Fast support for unstructured data processing
Yuanwei Fang, Tung Thanh Hoang, Michela Becchi, Andrew A. Chien · 2015
We propose the Unified Automata Processor (UAP), a new architecture that provides general and efficient support for finite automata (FA). The UAP supports a wide range of existing finite automata models (DFAs, NFAs, A-DFAs, JFAs, counting-DFAs, and counting-NFAs), and future novel FA models. Evaluation on realistic workloads shows that UAP implements all models efficiently, achieving line rates 94.5% of ideal. A single UAP lane delivers line rates 50x greater than software approaches on CPUs and GPUs. Scaling UAP to 64 lanes achieves FA transition throughputs as high as 295 Gbps, more than 100x higher than CPUs and GPUs, and even exceeding ASIC approaches such as IBM's RegX by 6x. With efficient support for multiple input streams, UAP achieves throughputs that saturate even high speed stacked DRAM memory systems.