(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-05-15)
Roy, Indranil
Our research is the first in-depth study in the use of the Micron Automata Processor, a novel re-configurable streaming co-processor which is purpose-built to execute thousands of Non-deterministic Finite Automata (NFA) in parallel. By design, this processor is well-suited to accelerate applications which need to find all occurrences of thousands of complex string-patterns in the input data. We have validated this by implementing two such applications, one from network security and the other from bioinformatics, both of which are significantly faster than their state-of-art counterparts. Our research has also widened the scope of the applications which can be accelerated through this processor by finding ways to quickly program any generic graph into it and then search for hard to find features like maximal-cliques and Hamiltonian paths. These applications and algorithms have yielded valuable design-inputs for next generation of the chip which is currently in design phase. We hope that this work paves the way to the early adoption of this upcoming architecture and to efficient solution of some of the currently computationally challenging problems.