On Sunday, I am going to present work on a distributed Rete engine I have been involved in over the last year. The presentation will be at the AGERE workshop co-located with SPLASH. Note that most of the work has been done by Janwillem and Thierry over the last two years. They did a great job in first implementing and parallelizing our Rete engine and now distributing it to scale up for “big data” scenarios.

Below, you can find a preprint of the paper, it’s abstract, and my presentation slides:

Abstract

Traffic monitoring or crowd management systems produce large amounts of data in the form of events that need to be processed to detect relevant incidents.

Rule-based pattern recognition is a promising approach for these applications, however, increasing amounts of data as well as large and complex rule sets demand for more and more processing power and memory. In order to scale such applications, a rule-based pattern detection system needs to be distributable over multiple machines. Today’s approaches are however focused on static distribution of rules or do not support reasoning over the full set of events.

We propose Cloud PARTE, a complex event detection system that implements the Rete algorithm on top of mobile actors. These actors can migrate between machines to respond to changes in the work load distribution. Cloud PARTE is an extension of PARTE and offers the first rule engine specifically tailored for continuous complex event detection that is able to benefit from elastic systems as provided by cloud computing platforms. It supports fully automatic load balancing and supports online rules with access to the entire event pool.

• Cloud PARTE: Elastic Complex Event Processing based on Mobile Actors, Janwillem Swalens, Thierry Renaux, Lode Hoste, Stefan Marr, Wolfgang De Meuter; Proceedings of AGERE! 2013, 3rd International Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control, ACM, to appear.
• Paper: PDF
• BibTex: BibSonomy

Slides