Computer Engineering Commons^™

An Overlay Architecture For Pattern Matching, Rasha Elham Karakchi

Theses and Dissertations

Deterministic and Non-deterministic Finite Automata (DFA and NFA) comprise the fundamental unit of work for many emerging big data applications, motivating recent efforts to develop Domain-Specific Architectures (DSAs) to exploit fine-grain parallelism available in automata workloads.

This dissertation presents NAPOLY (Non-Deterministic Automata Processor Over- LaY), an overlay architecture and associated software that attempt to maximally exploit on-chip memory parallelism for NFA evaluation. In order to avoid an upper bound in NFA size that commonly affects prior efforts, NAPOLY is optimized for runtime reconfiguration, allowing for full reconfiguration in 10s of microseconds. NAPOLY is also parameterizable, allowing for offline generation of …