research-article

HARE: hardware accelerator for regular expressions

Authors:

Aasheesh Kolli,

Michael J. Cafarella,

Loris D'Antoni,

Thomas F. WenischAuthors Info & Claims

MICRO-49: The 49th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture

Article No.: 44, Pages 1 - 12

Published: 15 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Rapidly processing text data is critical for many technical and business applications. Traditional software-based tools for processing large text corpora use memory bandwidth inefficiently due to software overheads and thus fall far short of peak scan rates possible on modern memory systems. Prior hardware designs generally target I/O rather than memory bandwidth. In this paper, we present HARE, a hardware accelerator for matching regular expressions against large in-memory logs. HARE comprises a stall-free hardware pipeline that scans input data at a fixed rate, examining multiple characters from a single input stream in parallel in a single accelerator clock cycle.

We describe a 1GHz 32-character-wide HARE design targeting ASIC implementation that processes data at 32 GB/s---matching modern memory bandwidths. This ASIC design outperforms software solutions by as much as two orders of magnitude. We further demonstrate a scaled-down FPGA proof-of-concept that operates at 100MHz with 4-wide parallelism (400 MB/s). Even at this reduced rate, the prototype outperforms grep by 1.5--20x on commonly used regular expressions.

References

[1]

"Helios Regular Expression Processor." {Online}. Available: http://titanicsystems.com/Products/Regular-eXpression-Processor-(RXP)

[2]

"Intel and Micron Produce Breakthrough Memory Technology." {Online}. Available: https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-and-micron-produce-breakthrough-memory-technology/

[3]

"Regular expression library." {Online}. Available: http://regexlib.com/

[4]

"Snort." {Online}. Available: http://snort.org/

[5]

"Structuring Unstructured Data." {Online}. Available: www.forbes.com/2007/04/04/teradata-solution-software-biz-logistics-cx_rm_0405data.html/

[6]

A. V. Aho, "Handbook of theoretical computer science (vol. a)," J. van Leeuwen, Ed. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1990, ch. Algorithms for Finding Patterns in Strings, pp. 255--300.

Digital Library

[7]

A. V. Aho and M. J. Corasick, "Efficient string matching: An aid to bibliographic search," Communications of the ACM, vol. 18, no. 6, 1975.

Digital Library

[8]

K. Asanovic, R. Bodik, J. Demmel, T. Keaveny, K. Keutzer, J. Kubiatowicz, N. Morgan, D. Patterson, K. Sen, J. Wawrzynek et al., "A view of the parallel computing landscape," Communications of the ACM, 2009.

Digital Library

[9]

M. Becchi, M. Franklin, and P. Crowley, "A workload for evaluating deep packet inspection architectures," in IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization, 2008.

[10]

J. Bispo, I. Sourdis, J. M. P. Cardoso, and S. Vassiliadis, "Regular expression matching for reconfigurable packet inspection," in IEEE International Conference on Field Programmable Technology, 2006.

[11]

R. D. Cameron and D. Lin, "Architectural support for swar text processing with parallel bit streams: The inductive doubling principle," in Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, 2009.

Digital Library

[12]

R. D. Cameron, T. C. Shermer, A. Shriraman, K. S. Herdy, D. Lin, B. R. Hull, and M. Lin, "Bitwise data parallelism in regular expression matching," in Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, 2014.

Digital Library

[13]

P. Dlugosch, D. Brown, P. Glendenning, M. Leventhal, and H. Noyes, "An efficient and scalable semiconductor architecture for parallel automata processing," IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 25, no. 12, pp. 3088--3098, 2014.

[14]

Y. Fang, T. T. Hoang, M. Becchi, and A. A. Chien, "Fast support for unstructured data processing: The unified automata processor," in Proceedings of the 48th International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2015.

Digital Library

[15]

H. Franke, C. Johnson, and J. Brown, "The ibm power edge of network processor," 2010.

[16]

E. Hatcher and O. Gospodnetic, "Lucene in action," 2004.

[17]

J. Holub and S. Štekr, "On parallel implementations of deterministic finite automata," in Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata, 2009.

Digital Library

[18]

J. E. Hopcroft and J. D. Ullman, Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., 1969.

Digital Library

[19]

N. Hua, H. Song, and T. Lakshman, "Variable-stride multi-pattern matching for scalable deep packet inspection," in INFOCOM 2009, IEEE, 2009.

[20]

D. Lin, N. Medforth, K. S. Herdy, A. Shriraman, and R. Cameron, "Parabix: Boosting the efficiency of text processing on commodity processors," in Proceedings of the 18th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, 2012.

Digital Library

[21]

J. V. Lunteren, C. Hagleitner, T. Heil, G. Biran, U. Shvadron, and K. Atasu, "Designing a programmable wire-speed regular-expression matching accelerator," in Proceedings of the 45th Annual International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2012.

Digital Library

[22]

S. Manegold, M. L. Kersten, and P. Boncz, "Database architecture evolution: Mammals flourished long before dinosaurs became extinct," Proc. VLDB Endow., 2009.

Digital Library

[23]

S. Memeti and S. Pllana, "Parem: A novel approach for parallel regular expression matching," CoRR, 2014.

[24]

A. Mitra, W. Najjar, and L. Bhuyan, "Compiling pcre to fpga for accelerating snort ids," in Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architecture for Networking and Communications Systems, 2007.

Digital Library

[25]

T. Mytkowicz, M. Musuvathi, and W. Schulte, "Data-parallel finite-state machines," in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, 2014.

Digital Library

[26]

M. E. Richard L. Villars, Carl W. Olofson, Big Data: What It Is and Why You Should Care. IDC, 2011.

[27]

V. Salapura, T. Karkhanis, P. Nagpurkar, and J. Moreira, "Accelerating business analytics applications," in Proceedings of the 18th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, 2012.

Digital Library

[28]

R. Sidhu and V. K. Prasanna, "Fast regular expression matching using fpgas," in Proceedings of the the 9th Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, 2001.

Digital Library

[29]

M. Sipser, Introduction to the Theory of Computation, 1st ed. International Thomson Publishing, 1996.

Digital Library

[30]

M. Stonebraker and L. A. Rowe, "The design of postgres," in Proceedings of the 1986 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 1986.

Digital Library

[31]

M. Stonebraker and A. Weisberg, "The voltdb main memory dbms." IEEE Data Eng. Bull., 2013.

[32]

L. Tan and T. Sherwood, "A high throughput string matching architecture for intrusion detection and prevention," in Proc. ISCA, 2005.

Digital Library

[33]

P. Tandon, F. M. Sleiman, M. Cafarella, and T. F. Wenisch, "Hawk: Hardware support for unstructured log processing," in International Conference on Data Engineering, 2016.

[34]

J. van Lunteren, "High-performance pattern-matching for intrusion detection," in 25th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications, 2006.

[35]

H. Wang, S. Pu, G. Knezek, and J. C. Liu, "Min-max: A counter-based algorithm for regular expression matching," IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2013.

Digital Library

[36]

Y. H. Yang and V. Prasanna, "High-performance and compact architecture for regular expression matching on fpga," IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2012.

Digital Library

[37]

Y.-H. E. Yang, W. Jiang, and V. K. Prasanna, "Compact architecture for high-throughput regular expression matching on fpga," in Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems, 2008.

Digital Library

Cited By

Parravicini DConficconi DSozzo EPilato CSantambrogio M(2021)CICERO: A Domain-Specific Architecture for Efficient Regular Expression MatchingACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/347698220:5s(1-24)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3476982
Fang YZou CChien A(2019)Accelerating raw data analysis with the ACCORDA software and hardware architectureProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3342263.334263412:11(1568-1582)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3342263.3342634
Sadredini ERahimi RVerma VStan MSkadron K(2019)eAPProceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3352460.3358324(87-99)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3352460.3358324
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Regular Expression Matching with Memristor TCAMs for Network Security
NANOARCH '18: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures

We propose using memristor-based TCAMs (Ternary Content Addressable Memory) to accelerate Regular Expression (RegEx) matching. RegEx matching is a key function in network security, where deep packet inspection finds and filters out malicious actors. ...
Exploring the design space of programmable regular expression matching accelerators

State-of-the-art regular expression (regex) accelerators combine parallel programmable state machines with cascaded, wide-issue instruction processors to improve the storage efficiency and the processing rates, while preserving the programmability. The ...
A Reconfigurable System Based on a Parallel and Pipelined Solution for Regular Expression Matching
FPL '10: Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications

We present a reconfigurable architecture that can perform highly parallel regular expression matching. The system can be configured on programmable devices such as FPGAs as a set of instances of a predefined core called REMA. Each core addresses one of ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

MICRO-49: The 49th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture

October 2016

816 pages

General Chairs:
Wei-Chung Hsu
NTU, Taiwan
,
Chia-Lin Yang
NTU, Taiwan
,
Program Chairs:
Mikko Lipasti
Univ. Wisconsin
,
Hsien-Hsin Lee
TSMC, Taiwan

Sponsors

SIGMICRO: ACM Special Interest Group on Microarchitectural Research and Processing
IEEE-CS\DATC: IEEE Computer Society

Publisher

IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 15 October 2016

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

MICRO-49

Sponsor:

SIGMICRO
IEEE-CS\DATC

MICRO-49: The 49th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture

October 15 - 19, 2016

Taipei, Taiwan

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 484 of 2,242 submissions, 22%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

12
Total Citations
View Citations
119
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)7
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 22 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Parravicini DConficconi DSozzo EPilato CSantambrogio M(2021)CICERO: A Domain-Specific Architecture for Efficient Regular Expression MatchingACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/347698220:5s(1-24)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3476982
Fang YZou CChien A(2019)Accelerating raw data analysis with the ACCORDA software and hardware architectureProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3342263.334263412:11(1568-1582)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3342263.3342634
Sadredini ERahimi RVerma VStan MSkadron K(2019)eAPProceedings of the 52nd Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3352460.3358324(87-99)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3352460.3358324
Bo CDang VXie TWadden JStan MSkadron K(2019)Automata Processing in Reconfigurable ArchitecturesACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems10.1145/331457612:2(1-25)Online publication date: 17-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3314576
Jepsen TAlvarez DFoster NKim CLee JMoshref MSoulé R(2019)Fast String Searching on PISAProceedings of the 2019 ACM Symposium on SDN Research10.1145/3314148.3314356(21-28)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3314148.3314356
Pei SYang JYang Q(2019)REGISTORACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/331014915:1(1-24)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3310149
Boroumand AGhose SPatel MHassan HLucia BAusavarungnirun RHsieh KHajinazar NMalladi KZheng HMutlu OManne SHunter HAltman E(2019)CoNDAProceedings of the 46th International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1145/3307650.3322266(629-642)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3307650.3322266
Becher AWildermann STeich JLehner WSalem K(2018)Optimistic regular expression matching on FPGAs for near-data processingProceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware10.1145/3211922.3211926(1-3)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3211922.3211926
Pei SYang JYang QBreitgand DYadgar GPorter DEyal I(2018)REGISTORProceedings of the 11th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference10.1145/3211890.3211900(13-25)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3211890.3211900
Angstadt KSubramaniyan ASadredini ERahimi RSkadron KWeimer WDas ROskin MInoue K(2018)ASPENProceedings of the 51st Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1109/MICRO.2018.00079(921-932)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MICRO.2018.00079
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten