It has been a while since SPLASH’12, but I got finally around to put up a copy of our paper at the AGERE’12 workshop. It is based on Thierry’s master thesis and presents his work on parallelizing a Rete engine for gesture recognition. Lode and I were his advisors and are happily working with him on what we promised in the future work section.

Abstract

Applying imperative programming techniques to process event streams, like those generated by multi-touch devices and 3D cameras, has significant engineering drawbacks. Declarative approaches solve these problems but have not been able to scale on multicore systems while providing guaranteed response times.

We propose PARTE, a parallel scalable complex event processing engine which allows a declarative definition of event patterns and provides soft real-time guarantees for their recognition. It extends the state-saving Rete algorithm and maps the event matching onto a graph of actor nodes. Using a tiered event matching model, PARTE provides upper bounds on the detection latency. Based on the domain-specific constraints, PARTE’s design relies on a combination of 1) lock-free data structures; 2) safe memory management techniques; and 3) message passing between Rete nodes. In our benchmarks, we measured scalability up to 8 cores, outperforming highly optimized sequential implementations.

• Parallel Gesture Recognition with Soft Real-Time Guarantees, Thierry Renaux, Lode Hoste, Stefan Marr, Wolfgang De Meuter, Proceedings of the 2nd edition on Programming Systems, Languages and Applications based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control Abstractions (AGERE’2012), page 35–46. ACM (2012).
• Paper: PDF ©ACM, 2012. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.
• DOI: 10.1145/2414639.2414646
• BibTex: BibSonomy