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Programming paradigm for parallel processing of data streams
In computer science, stream processing (also known as event stream processing, data stream processing, or distributed stream processing) is a programming paradigm which views streams, or sequences of events in time, as the central input and output objects of computation. Stream processing encompasses dataflow programming, reactive programming, and distributed data processing. Stream processing systems aim to expose parallel processing for data streams and rely on streaming algorithms for efficient implementation. The software stack for these systems includes components such as programming models and query languages, for expressing computation; stream management systems, for distribution and scheduling; and hardware components for acceleration including floating point units, graphics processing units, and field programmable gate arrays. The stream processing paradigm simplifies parallel software and hardware by restricting the parallel computation that can be performed. Given a sequence of data (a stream), a series of operations (kernel functions) is applied to each element in the stream. Kernel functions are usually pipelined, and optimal local on chip memory reuse is attempted, in order to minimize the loss in bandwidth, associated with external memory interaction. Uniform streaming, where one kernel function is applied to all elements in the stream, is typical. Since the kernel and stream abstractions expose data dependencies, compiler tools can fully automate and optimize on chip management tasks. Stream processing hardware can use scoreboarding, for example, to initiate a direct memory access (DMA) when dependencies become known. The elimination of manual DMA management reduces software complexity, and an associated elimination for hardware cached I/O, reduces the data area expanse that has to be involved with service by specialized computational units such as arithmetic logic units. During the 1980s stream processing was explored within dataflow programming. An example is the language SISAL (Streams and Iteration in a Single Assignment Language).

Basic computers started from a sequential execution paradigm. Traditional CPUs are SISD based, which means they conceptually perform only one operation at a time. As the computing needs of the world evolved, the amount of data to be managed increased very quickly. It was obvious that the sequential programming model could not cope with the increased need for processing power. Various efforts have been spent on finding alternative ways to perform massive amounts of computations but the only solution was to exploit some level of parallel execution. The result of those efforts was SIMD, a programming paradigm which allowed applying one instruction to multiple instances of (different) data. Most of the time, SIMD was being used in a SWAR environment. By using more complicated structures, one could also have MIMD parallelism. Although those two paradigms were efficient, real world implementations were plagued with limitations from memory alignment problems to synchronization issues and limited parallelism. Only few SIMD processors survived as stand alone components; most were embedded in standard CPUs. Consider a simple program adding up two arrays containing 100 4 component vectors (i. e. 400 numbers in total).

Stanford University stream processing projects included the Stanford Real Time Programmable Shading Project started in 1999. A prototype called Imagine was developed in 2002. A project called Merrimac ran until about 2004. AT&T also researched stream enhanced processors as graphics processing units rapidly evolved in both speed and functionality. Since these early days, dozens of stream processing languages have been developed, as well as specialized hardware.

Apart from specifying streaming applications in high level languages, models of computation (MoCs) also have been widely used as dataflow models and process based models.

Historically, CPUs began implementing various tiers of memory access optimizations because of the ever increasing performance when compared to relatively slow growing external memory bandwidth. As this gap widened, big amounts of die area were dedicated to hiding memory latencies. Since fetching information and opcodes to those few ALUs is expensive, very little die area is dedicated to actual mathematical machinery (as a rough estimation, consider it to be less than 10%). A similar architecture exists on stream processors but thanks to the new programming model, the amount of transistors dedicated to management is actually very little. Beginning from a whole system point of view, stream processors usually exist in a controlled environment. GPUs do exist on an add in board (this seems to also apply to Imagine). CPUs continue do the job of managing system resources, running applications, and such. The stream processor is usually equipped with a fast, efficient, proprietary memory bus (crossbar switches are now common, multi buses have been employed in the past). The exact amount of memory lanes is dependent on the market range. As this is written, there are still 64 bit wide interconnections around (entry level). Most mid range models use a fast 128 bit crossbar switch matrix (4 or 2 segments), while high end models deploy huge amounts of memory (actually up to 512 MB) with a slightly slower crossbar that is 256 bits wide. By contrast, standard processors from Intel Pentium to some Athlon 64 have only a single 64 bit wide data bus. Memory access patterns are much more predictable. While arrays do exist, their dimension is fixed at kernel invocation. The thing which most closely matches a multiple pointer indirection is an indirection chain, which is however guaranteed to finally read or write from a specific memory area (inside a stream). Because of the SIMD nature of the stream processor's execution units (ALUs clusters), read/write operations are expected to happen in bulk, so memories are optimized for high bandwidth rather than low latency (this is a difference from Rambus and DDR SDRAM, for example). This also allows for efficient memory bus negotiations. Most (90%) of a stream processor's work is done on chip, requiring only 1% of the global data to be stored to memory. This is where knowing the kernel temporaries and dependencies pays. Internally, a stream processor features some clever communication and management circuits but what's interesting is the Stream Register File (SRF). This is conceptually a large cache in which stream data is stored to be transferred to external memory in bulks. As a cache like software controlled structure to the various ALUs, the SRF is shared between all the various ALU clusters. The key concept and innovation here done with Stanford's Imagine chip is that the compiler is able to automate and allocate memory in an optimal way, fully transparent to the programmer. The dependencies between kernel functions and data is known through the programming model which enables the compiler to perform flow analysis and optimally pack the SRFs. Commonly, this cache and DMA management can take up the majority of a project's schedule, something the stream processor (or at least Imagine) totally automates. Tests done at Stanford showed that the compiler did an as well or better job at scheduling memory than if you hand tuned the thing with much effort. There is proof; there can be a lot of clusters because inter cluster communication is assumed to be rare. Internally however, each cluster can efficiently exploit a much lower amount of ALUs because intra cluster communication is common and thus needs to be highly efficient. To keep those ALUs fetched with data, each ALU is equipped with local register files (LRFs), which are basically its usable registers. This three tiered data access pattern, makes it easy to keep temporary data away from slow memories, thus making the silicon implementation highly efficient and power saving.

Although an order of magnitude speedup can be reasonably expected (even from mainstream GPUs when computing in a streaming manner), not all applications benefit from this. Communication latencies are actually the biggest problem. Although PCI Express improved this with full duplex communications, getting a GPU (and possibly a generic stream processor) to work will possibly take long amounts of time. This means it's usually counter productive to use them for small datasets. Because changing the kernel is a rather expensive operation the stream architecture also incurs penalties for small streams, a behaviour referred to as the short stream effect. Pipelining is a very widespread and heavily used practice on stream processors, with GPUs featuring pipelines exceeding 200 stages. The cost for switching settings is dependent on the setting being modified but it is now considered to always be expensive. To avoid those problems at various levels of the pipeline, many techniques have been deployed such as "über shaders" and "texture atlases". Those techniques are game oriented because of the nature of GPUs, but the concepts are interesting for generic stream processing as well.