Revisiting the Design of Data Stream Processing Systems on Multi-Core Processors

Driven by the rapidly increasing demand for handling real-time data streams, many data stream processing (DSP) systems have been proposed. Regardless of the different architectures of those DSP systems, they are mostly aiming at scaling out using a cluster of commodity machines and built around a number of key design aspects: a) pipelined processing with message passing, b) on-demand data parallelism, and c) JVM based implementation. However, there lacks a study on those key design aspects on modern scale-up architectures, where more CPU cores are being put on the same die, and the on-chip cache hierarchies are getting larger, deeper, and complex. Multiple sockets bring non-uniform memory access (NUMA) effort. In this paper, we revisit the aforementioned design aspects on a modern scale-up server. Specifically, we use a series of applications as micro benchmark to conduct detailed profiling studies on Apache Storm and Flink. From the profiling results, we observe two major performance issues: a) the massively parallel execution model causes serious front-end stalls, which are a major performance bottleneck issue on a single CPU socket, b) the lack of NUMA-aware mechanism causes major drawback on the scalability of DSP systems on multi-socket architectures. Addressing these issues should allow DSP systems to exploit modern scale-up architectures, which also benefits scaling out environments. We present our initial efforts on resolving the above-mentioned performance issues, which have shown up to 3.2x and 3.1x improvement on the performance of Storm and Flink, respectively.