AIR: A Light-Weight Yet High-Performance Dataflow Engine based on Asynchronous Iterative Routing

Abstract

Distributed Stream Processing Engines (DSPEs) are currently among the most emerging topics in data management, with applications ranging from real-time event monitoring to processing complex dataflow programs and big data analytics. In this paper, we describe the architecture of our AIR engine, which is designed from scratch in C++ using the Message Passing Interface (MPI), pthreads for multithreading, and is directly deployed on top of a common HPC workload manager such as SLURM. AIR implements a light-weight, dynamic sharding protocol (referred to as "Asynchronous Iterative Routing"), which facilitates a direct and asynchronous communication among all worker nodes and thereby completely avoids any additional communication overhead with a dedicated master node. With its unique design, AIR fills the gap between the prevalent scale-out (but Java-based) architectures like Apache Spark and Flink, on one hand, and recent scale-up (and C++ based) prototypes such as StreamBox and PiCo, on the other hand. Our experiments over various benchmark settings confirm that AIR performs as good as the best scale-up SPEs on a single-node setup, while it outperforms existing scale-out DSPEs in terms of processing latency and sustainable throughput by a factor of up to 15 in a distributed setting.