Faster, Exact, More General Response-Time Analysis for NVIDIA Holoscan Applications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present a scalable method to compute exact worst-case end-to-end latency in applications built on the NVIDIA Holoscan SDK, a framework increasingly adopted for soft real-time ML workloads in medical devices, surgical instruments, and robotics. Holoscan applications are structured as directed acyclic graphs of non-preemptible task threads (operators) connected by FIFO queues, where execution depends not only on input availability but also on downstream buffer capacity - an atypical backpressure mechanism not captured by standard dataflow or middleware models. Existing analyses either lack convergence guarantees or rely on restrictive assumptions (e.g., fixed execution times, unit-sized buffers), resulting in overly conservative bounds. We show that Holoscan's scheduling semantics can be faithfully reduced to homogeneous synchronous dataflow graphs (HSDFGs), enabling exact end-to-end latency analysis. Building on this insight, we introduce a dynamic algorithm that computes tight upper bounds on response time across infinite input streams under variable task runtimes and arbitrary buffer sizes. We prove its correctness and convergence, and demonstrate that it outperforms HSDFG model checking with UPPAAL in runtime while avoiding the pessimism of prior Holoscan-specific analyses. Experiments on real Holoscan applications from NVIDIA HoloHub and large synthetic graphs confirm its scalability and precision.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".