Analysis of a Simple Approach to Modeling Performance for Streaming Data Applications

Current state of the art systems contain various types of multicore processors, General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) and occasionally Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) or Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). With heterogeneity comes multiple abstraction layers that hide underlying complexity. While necessary to ease programmability of these systems, this hidden complexity makes quantitative performance modeling a difficult task. This paper outlines a computationally simple approach to modeling the overall throughput and buffering needs of a streaming application deployed on heterogeneous hardware.