SLIPstream

A critical problem in implementing interactive perception applications is the considerable computational cost of current computer vision and machine learning algorithms, which typically run one to two orders of magnitude too slowly to be used interactively. Fortunately, many of these algorithms exhibit coarse-grained task and data parallelism that can be exploited across machines. The SLIPstream project focuses on building a highly-parallel runtime system called Sprout that can harness the computing power of a cluster to execute perception applications with low latency. This paper makes the case for using clusters for perception applications, describes the architecture of the Sprout runtime, and presents two compute-intensive yet interactive applications.