Greatly Accelerated Scaling of Streaming Problems with A Migrating Thread Architecture

Abstract

Applications where continuous streams of data are passed through large data structures are becoming of increasing importance. However, their execution on conventional architectures, especially when parallelism is desired to boost performance, is highly inefficient. The primary issue is often with the need to stream large numbers of disparate data items through the equivalent of very large hash tables distributed across many nodes. This paper builds on some prior work on the Firehose streaming benchmark where an emerging architecture using threads that can migrate through memory has shown to be much more efficient at such problems. This paper extends that work to use a second generation system to not only show that same improved efficiency (10X) for larger core counts, but even significantly higher raw performance (with FPGA-based cores running at 1/10th the clock of conventional systems). Further, this additional data yields insight into what resources represent the bottlenecks to even more performance, and make a reasonable projection that implementation of such an architecture with current technology would lead to 10X performance gain on an apples-to-apples basis with conventional systems.