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 a 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 with
an industrial workload 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. For end-to-end workload, the NanoStreams microserver achieves energy savings up to 10.7x, 5.87x and 5x compared to the Intel server, Calxeda microserver and ODROID node respectively.