High-throughput stream processing with actors

The steady growth of data volume produced as continuous streams makes paramount the development of software capable of providing timely results to the users. The Actor Model (AM) offers a high-level of abstraction suited for developing scalable message-passing applications. It allows the application developer to focus on the application logic moving the burden of implementing fast and reliable inter-Actors message-exchange to the implementation framework. In this paper, we focus on evaluating the model in high data rate streaming applications targeting scale-up servers. Our approach leverages Parallel Patterns (PP) abstractions to model streaming computations and introduces optimizations that otherwise could be challenging to implement without violating the Actor Model's semantics. The experimental analysis demonstrates that the new implementation skeletons we propose for our PPs can bring significant performance boosts (more than 2X) in high data rate streaming applications implemented in CAF.