DSParLib: A C++ Template Library for Distributed Stream Parallelism

Stream processing applications deal with millions of data items continuously generated over time. Often, they must be processed in real-time and scale performance, which requires the use of distributed parallel computing resources. In C/C++, the current state-of-the-art for distributed architectures and High-Performance Computing is Message Passing Interface (MPI). However, exploiting stream parallelism using MPI is complex and error-prone because it exposes many low-level details to the programmer. In this work, we introduce a new parallel programming abstraction for implementing distributed stream parallelism named DSParLib. Our abstraction of MPI simplifies parallel programming by providing a pattern-based and building block-oriented development to inter-connect, model, and parallelize data streams found in modern applications. Experiments conducted with five different stream processing applications and the representative PARSEC Ferret benchmark revealed that DSParLib is efficient and flexible. Also, DSParLib achieved similar or better performance, required less coding, and provided simpler abstractions to express parallelism with respect to handwritten MPI programs.