ERSAP: Toward Better NP Data-Stream Analytics with Flow-Based Programming

This article presents a framework based on a flow-based programming (FBP) paradigm to design data-stream processing applications for Nuclear Physics (NP). The developed framework encourages a functional decomposition of the overall data-processing application into small monofunctional artifacts that are easy to understand, develop, and debug. The fact that these artifacts (actors) are programmatically independent means that they can be scaled and optimized independently, which is difficult for monolithic application components. One of the advantages of this approach is fault tolerance, where independent actors can come and go in the data stream without stopping or crashing the entire application. Because actors are loosely coupled and data carries context, they can run in heterogeneous environments and utilize wide-ranging accelerators. This article describes the main design concepts of this framework, presenting a proof-of-concept application and the results of processing on-beam calorimeter streaming data.