UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE An Efficient Execution Model for Reactive Stream Programs

Stream programming is a paradigm where a program is structured by a set of compu-tational nodes connected by streams. Focusing on data moving between computational nodes via streams, this programming model fits well for applications that process long sequences of data. We call such applications reactive stream programs (RSPs) to distin-guish them from stream programs with rather small and finite input data. In stream programming, concurrency is expressed implicitly via communication streams. This helps to reduce the complexity of parallel programming. For this reason, stream programming has gained popularity as a programming model for parallel platforms. However, it is also challenging to analyse and improve the performance without an under-standing of the program’s internal behaviour. This thesis targets an efficient execution model for deploying RSPs on parallel platforms. This execution model includes a mon-itoring framework to understand the internal behaviour of RSPs, scheduling strategies for RSPs on uniform shared-memory platforms; and mapping techniques for deploying RSPs on heterogeneous distributed platforms. The foundation of the execution model i