Using In-Memory Computing to Create the Digital Twin: A New Model for Stream Processing

Businesses that track data from live systems, such as patient monitoring networks or wind turbine farms, need insights within less than a second to react to fast-changing conditions, make mission-critical decisions, and capitalize on new opportunities. Popular software platforms for streaming analytics (e.g., Apache Storm, Flink, Spark Streaming, and legacy CEP) let applications extract insights from data streams but are not well suited to modeling the underlying real-time context in which streaming data must be evaluated. As a result, they can fail to deliver crucial value in helping steer the behavior of these systems. With their object-oriented architecture, in-memory data grids (IMDGs) are now poised to overcome these limitations and enable streaming analytics to deliver significantly higher value than previously thought possible.

The key to deeper introspection into the dynamic behavior of live systems for sub-second feedback is to shift the focus from solely examining incoming data streams to analyzing the combination of data streams and the data sources that generate them. This enables these streams to be viewed in a richer context and provide significantly more valuable insights. Gartner has used the term “digital twins” in its recent report “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017” to refer to software-based representations of real-world entities, such as the above examples of patients or wind turbines.  For example, consider a patient monitoring system receiving telemetry from a population with remote pacemakers. By creating a digital twin of each patient which tracks medical history, lifestyle, and current medications, the system can extract more information from this telemetry and filter unnecessary alerts. Likewise, modeling the specific characteristics and condition of a wind turbine helps streaming analytics interpret telemetry seeking to predict if a blade failure is imminent.

It is cumbersome and often inefficient to implement digital twins with traditional stream processing technologies because of their lack of an integrated, object-oriented storage model. However, IMDGs provide a highly effective platform for incorporating digital twins into streaming analytics. IMDGs combine object-oriented, in-memory data storage for hosting digital twins with fast data access and integrated computing to implement streaming updates and fine grained, sub-second analysis. These capabilities both simplify development and maximize performance by avoiding unnecessary data motion. Moreover, unlike Spark, IMDGs are designed to meet the stringent high availability requirements of live systems.

This talk explains how IMDGs can be used to provide a highly effective platform for building stream processing applications that incorporate digital twins. With code samples, it shows how a digital twin can be constructed and used to ingest and analyze incoming data streams to provide immediate feedback to a live system. This approach is compared other popular stream processing architectures, such as Spark and Apache Beam, which by their design make it difficult to implement a digital twin.

The talk also explores three specific advantages of IMDGs over other stream processing architectures: the ability to cleanly separate application-specific code from the grid’s orchestration layer using object-oriented techniques, the integration of in-memory data storage and computation to combine event ingestion with sub-second analysis, and increased performance and scalability resulting from the grid’s ability to minimize data motion. Examples in medical monitoring, e-commerce, and the Industrial Internet of Things are used to illustrate the importance of digital twins and these key advantages.

About the Talk

This talk is targeted at application developers who want to explore the use of in-memory computing for streaming analytics. The talk’s goal is to describe a key limitation (tracking streaming context) of current techniques (e.g., Spark streaming) and describe a new approach (implementing a digital twin using an in-memory data grid) that overcomes this limitation. It explains how the object-oriented architecture of in-memory data grids makes them well suited to applications that implement digital twins. The audience should gain an understanding of a new design technique for IMC applications, learn how to make use of it, and explore the advantages it offers for streaming analytics The importance of the talk is that this technique provides leverage for developers that may force the big data community to rethink current approaches to stream processing.