About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
SCOPES 2016
Conference paper
Scalable DFA compilation for high-performance regular-expression matching
Abstract
Regular-expression accelerators often rely on sophisticated compilers to fully exploit the available hardware capabilities for achieving wire-speed scan rates of multiple tens of gigabits per second. This paper presents a method for the efficient compilation of pattern-matching functions specified by deterministic finite automata (DFAs) into executable structures targeted at accelerators based on B-FSM programmable state machines. The compilation scheme presented is able to effectively exploit an adaptive compression mechanism to obtain one of the most compact statetransition-table structures in the industry, in combination with fast compilation times. The heuristic-based approach scales to very large DFAs having tens of millions of transitions, while achieving an approximately linear growth of the storage needs as a function of the DFA size.