CEP in hardware, too?
Posted by Paul Vincent
TIBCO announced today the delivery of the first TIBCO Messaging Appliance - basically an RV agent in a box - and this has been widely reported and blogged about. It’s quite feasible that the same approach could be used for “basic” complex event processing operations, especially those that don’t require history (or much persistence) - examples that spring to mind include simple streaming queries, aggregations, identifying missing events over time, and so forth. Indeed, there are academic studies of such approaches in progress today.
The TIBCO Messaging Appliance works with the TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP product, whose multi-agent architecture may well be required to consume such high messaging rates, as well as any other RV-enabled tool.
Agent-based, Complex Event Processing (CEP), Trends, XTP | 04 February 2009 |
7 Comments
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By Tim Bass, February 5, 2009 @ 00:49
This is an OEM deal by TIBCO with Solace Systems.
Why not mention Solace in the blog or on the TIBCO product page?
By Marco Seiriö, February 5, 2009 @ 05:54
I’m a great fan of appliances. But sadly they never seem to catch on. Instead the normal way of installing software on generic hardware seems always be favored. Special purpose hardware seems to always loose to hardware used for more than one specific task. Only exception seems to be things that everyone need, like boxes for file and printer sharing.
It would be interesting to do something Kaskad Technology tried out, namely put a specialized FPGA in the box to speed up the processing.
By Kal Krishnan, February 5, 2009 @ 13:20
Just to set the record straight - this is not just a simple “rebadge” job involving some general pupose software bundled on an OEM piece of hardware, as may be implied in the above comments. Rather, it is a “from the ground up” reimplementation of RV using ASIC and FPGA technologies, resulting in an order of magnitude improvement in performance. As Paul said, this is a very exciting development for CEP, as many of the applications are message I/O bound since BE is multi-threaded and multi-engine capable!
By vincent, February 6, 2009 @ 04:41
Nigel posted at http://preferisco.blogspot.com/2009/02/tibco-rv-in-box-would-appliances-help.html that he thought CEP-with-history would also be a good target for hardware-acceleration. That’s an interesting thought, but the issues are:
- history = store + complexity (not many hardware-only databases out there)
- centralized stores: large CEP applications keep lots of event history around, which is incompatible with performance unless you go distributed, which in turn gives you data partitioning and location problems of the sort solved by the BE cache / data grid approach.
By Alex, February 6, 2009 @ 14:40
such a cache / data grid approach within BE being an OEM of Oracle Coherence… by the way.
By Tim Bass, February 8, 2009 @ 01:43
@Krishnan
Yes, Solace did all the work, including coming up with the idea of embedding RV into ASIC.
By vincent, February 8, 2009 @ 14:37
Hi Alex - yes BE has a data grid (in software) that is effectively a distributed OODB (based on an extended version of Tangosol / Oracle Coherance). I’ll need to describe the extensions in more detail in a later blog post… but I’m pretty sure similar data grids are not available yet in silicon.
Hi Tim / Kal - info on Solace for this device has been public domain for a few months now - see http://www.solacesystems.com/news/solace-and-tibco-announce-partnership-to-deliver-new-hardware-based-messaging-appliance
Cheers,