Symbiote Coprocessor Unit—A Streaming Coprocessor for Data Stream Acceleration

This paper describes the design and the architecture of symbiote coprocessor unit (SCU)—a programmable streaming coprocessor for a heterogeneous reconfigurable logic-assisted data stream management systems (DSMSs) such as symbiote. The SCU is intended for streaming applications with real-time event and data processing that have stricter deadlines, high-bandwidth, and high-accuracy requirements. To meet these requirements, the SCU exploits unique characteristics of DSMSs, such as single-pass tuple processing, windowed operators, and inherent data level parallelism, using a single-instruction multiple-data very large instruction word (SIMD-VLIW) microarchitecture and a novel inverted distributed register file. In order to better explain the instruction set, design, and functionality of the various units in the SCU, this paper also provides a brief overview of SymQL—a procedural query language that we developed to describe the queries that can be executed on the SCU. Finally, this paper presents the performance of SCU using four queries that represent common data stream processing use-cases, one of them being similar to a query found in the Linear Road Benchmark. Using these queries on SCU simulation, we show that the SCU outperforms a software-only DSMS running on an AMD Opteron 2350 quad-core processor by 1.5–42 times.