Keep Calm and React with Foresight: Strategies for Low-Latency and Energy-Efficient Elastic Data Stream Processing

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of designing control strategies for elastic stream processing applications. Elasticity allows applications to rapidly change their configuration (e.g. the number of used resources) on-the-fly, in response to fluctuations of their workload. In this work we face this problem by adopting the Model Predictive Control technique, a control-theoretic method aimed at finding the optimal application configuration along a limited prediction horizon by solving an online optimization problem. Our control strategies are designed to address latency constraints, by using Queueing Theory models, and energy consumption by changing the number of used cores and the CPU frequency through the Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) function of modern multi-core CPUs. The proactive capabilities, in addition to the latency- and energy-awareness, represent the novel features of our approach. Experiments performed using a high-frequency trading application show the effectiveness compared with state-of-the-art techniques.

Publication
Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP)