NanoStreams: A Microserver Architecture for Real-Time Analytics on Fast Data Streams

Ever increasing power consumption has created great interest in energy-efficient microserver architectures but they lack the computational, networking, and storage power necessary to cope with real-time data analytics. We propose NanoStreams, an integrated architecture comprising an ARM-based microserver, coupled via a novel, low latency network interface, Nanowire, to an Analytics-on-Chip architecture implemented on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology; the architecture comprises ARM cores for performing low latency transactional processing, integrated with programmable, energy efficient Nanocore processors for high-throughput streaming analytics. The paper outlines the complete system architecture, hardware level detail, compiler, network protocol, and programming environment. We present experiments from the financial services sector, comparing a state-of-the-art server based on Intel Sandy Bridge processors, an ARM based Calxeda ECS-1000 microserver and ODROID XU3 node, with the NanoStreams microserver architecture using an industrial workload. For end-to-end workload, the NanoStreams microserver achieves energy savings up to 10.7×, 5.87× and 5× compared to the Intel server, Calxeda microserver and ODROID node, respectively.