The need for real-time processing of high-volume, continuously updated data has been documented in a variety of emerging distributed stream processing applications, such as:

• Network traffic monitoring
• Click stream analysis
• Financial trading surveillance
• Sensor data analysis
• Customization of multimedia or news feeds

Synergy is a middleware running on the nodes of a distributed system to offer distributed stream processing applications, under QoS constraints, and while efficiently managing the system's resources.