The process trellis architecture for real-time monitors

The process trellis is a parallel software architecture for building heuristic real-time monitors. These programs, for example Intelligent Cardiovascular Monitors, must process massive quantities of data in real time. It is natural to turn to parallelism to meet these computational requirements. The process trellis software architecture is intended to simplify the creation and maintenance of heuristic real-time monitors. To do this it must be 1) modular, 2) efficient and 3) predictable.

This paper presents the goals and an overview of the process trellis. We have implemented a process trellis shell, which we describe. It is in use as the frame for an Intelligent Cardiovascular Monitor (ICM) which we are building with colleagues from the Yale School of Medicine. An analytical model is able to produce an upper bound on the time required by arbitrary trellis programs. Finally, we report on the predicted and actual performance of the ICM and synthetic programs consisting of roughly 7000 processes.