Aeolus: An optimizer for distributed intra-node-parallel streaming systems

Aeolus is a prototype implementation of a topology optimizer on top of the distributed streaming system Storm. Aeolus extends Storm with a batching layer which can increase the topology's throughput by more than one order of magnitude. Furthermore, Aeolus implements an optimization algorithm that computes the optimal batch size and degree of parallelism for each node in the topology automatically. Even if Aeolus is built on top of Storm, the developed concepts are not limited to Storm and can be applied to any distributed intra-node-parallel streaming system. We propose to demo Aeolus using an interactive Web UI. One part of the Web UI is a topology builder allowing the user to interact with the system. Topologies can be created from scratch and their structure and/or parameters can be modified. Furthermore, the user is able to observe the impact of the changes on the optimization decisions and runtime behavior. Additionally, the Web UI gives a deep insight in the optimization process by visualizing it. The user can interactively step through the optimization process while the UI shows the optimizer's state, computations, and decisions. The Web UI is also able to monitor the execution of a non-optimized and optimized topology simultaneously showing the advantage of using Aeolus.