Design of a request/response buffering application for I/O intensive workloads

The performance of I/O intensive applications is largely determined by the organization of data and the associated insertion/extraction techniques. In this paper we present the design and implementation of an application that is targeted at managing data received (upto ~ 150 Gb/s payload throughput) into host DRAM, buffering data for several seconds, matched with the DRAM size, before being dropped. All data are validated, processed and indexed. The features extracted from the processing are streamed out to subscribers over the network; in addition, while data resides in the buffer, about 0.1 ‰ of them are served to remote clients upon request. Last but not least, the application must be able to locally persist data at full input speed when instructed to do so. The characteristics of the incoming data stream (fixed or variable rate, fixed or variable payload size) heavily influences the choice of implementation of the buffer management system. The application design promotes the separation of interfaces (concepts) and application oriented specializations (models) that makes it possible to generalize most of the workflows and only requires minimal effort to integrate new data sources. After the description of the application design, we will present the hardware platform used for validation and benchmarking of the software, and the performance results obtained.