Continuos against Burst Mode

BAP Online Manuals : Bap Language Tutorial : Parallelism with Brain Aid Prolog : Continuos against Burst Mode
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2.3.4. Continuos against Burst Mode

The existing structured communication examples can be split into two groups:

Burst Mode

The burst mode applications receive a task, the worker processes and/or the pipeline are set up, the computation happens and everything is disposed of again.

Features:

flexible system management
several applications may run together or consecutively
overhead for setting up the communication scheme

Continuos Mode

Continuos mode applications receive a continuos stream of data, processed by a communication scheme set up at start-up time. This scheme is widely used for real-time applications.

Features:

no runtime overhead for setting up the communication
higher overall system throughput because of better
optimization of the load placements
less flexible system usage
higher system stability with long term applications

Huge applications that get close to the system limits (memory, communication load, number of parallel processes) should run in continuos mode to optimize overall performance. Regular applications can be run in burst mode without problems. This has the advantage that operation can be done interactively and that several of these applications can be run simultaneously.