New Regular Expressions on Old Accelerators

Jackson Woodruff; Michael F.P. O'Boyle

doi:10.1109/DAC18074.2021.9586095

New Regular Expressions on Old Accelerators

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Abstract

Regular expressions (regexes) play a key role in a wide range of systems including network intrusion detection. FPGA accelerators can provide power savings over CPUs by exploiting MISD parallelism inherent in regex processing. However, FPGA solutions are brittle, requiring hours to reprogram when rulesets change, while real-world security threats evolve rapidly.

We present RXPSC (Regular eXPression Structural Compiler), a compiler designed to compile new regexes to existing regex accelerators. We use input-stream translation to enable fixed FPGA accelerators to accelerate new patterns with minimal overhead and little update delay. Compared to a solution where new regexes run on a CPU, RXPSC reduces CPU load by more than a factor of ten for 84% of unseen regexes in ANMLZoo benchmarks.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	2021 58th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)
Publisher	IEEE
Pages	343-348
Number of pages	6
ISBN (Electronic)	978-1-6654-3274-0
ISBN (Print)	978-1-6654-3275-7
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/DAC18074.2021.9586095
Publication status	Published - 13 Nov 2021
Event	58th Design Automation Conference - San Francisco, United States Duration: 5 Dec 2021 → 9 Dec 2021 https://www.dac.com/

Publication series

Name
ISSN (Print)	0738-100X

Conference

Conference	58th Design Automation Conference
Abbreviated title	DAC 2021
Country/Territory	United States
City	San Francisco
Period	5/12/21 → 9/12/21
Internet address	https://www.dac.com/

Keywords

regular expressions
accelerator
compiler

Access to Document

10.1109/DAC18074.2021.9586095Licence: All Rights Reserved

New Regular Expressions_WOODRUFF_DOA15022021_AFVAccepted author manuscript, 261 KBLicence: All Rights Reserved

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9586095Licence: All Rights Reserved

Cite this

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title = "New Regular Expressions on Old Accelerators",

abstract = "Regular expressions (regexes) play a key role in a wide range of systems including network intrusion detection. FPGA accelerators can provide power savings over CPUs by exploiting MISD parallelism inherent in regex processing. However, FPGA solutions are brittle, requiring hours to reprogram when rulesets change, while real-world security threats evolve rapidly.We present RXPSC (Regular eXPression Structural Compiler), a compiler designed to compile new regexes to existing regex accelerators. We use input-stream translation to enable fixed FPGA accelerators to accelerate new patterns with minimal overhead and little update delay. Compared to a solution where new regexes run on a CPU, RXPSC reduces CPU load by more than a factor of ten for 84% of unseen regexes in ANMLZoo benchmarks.",

keywords = "regular expressions, accelerator, compiler",

author = "Jackson Woodruff and O'Boyle, {Michael F.P.}",

year = "2021",

month = nov,

day = "13",

doi = "10.1109/DAC18074.2021.9586095",

language = "English",

isbn = "978-1-6654-3275-7",

publisher = "IEEE",

pages = "343--348",

booktitle = "2021 58th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)",

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TY - GEN

T1 - New Regular Expressions on Old Accelerators

AU - Woodruff, Jackson

AU - O'Boyle, Michael F.P.

PY - 2021/11/13

Y1 - 2021/11/13

N2 - Regular expressions (regexes) play a key role in a wide range of systems including network intrusion detection. FPGA accelerators can provide power savings over CPUs by exploiting MISD parallelism inherent in regex processing. However, FPGA solutions are brittle, requiring hours to reprogram when rulesets change, while real-world security threats evolve rapidly.We present RXPSC (Regular eXPression Structural Compiler), a compiler designed to compile new regexes to existing regex accelerators. We use input-stream translation to enable fixed FPGA accelerators to accelerate new patterns with minimal overhead and little update delay. Compared to a solution where new regexes run on a CPU, RXPSC reduces CPU load by more than a factor of ten for 84% of unseen regexes in ANMLZoo benchmarks.

AB - Regular expressions (regexes) play a key role in a wide range of systems including network intrusion detection. FPGA accelerators can provide power savings over CPUs by exploiting MISD parallelism inherent in regex processing. However, FPGA solutions are brittle, requiring hours to reprogram when rulesets change, while real-world security threats evolve rapidly.We present RXPSC (Regular eXPression Structural Compiler), a compiler designed to compile new regexes to existing regex accelerators. We use input-stream translation to enable fixed FPGA accelerators to accelerate new patterns with minimal overhead and little update delay. Compared to a solution where new regexes run on a CPU, RXPSC reduces CPU load by more than a factor of ten for 84% of unseen regexes in ANMLZoo benchmarks.

KW - regular expressions

KW - accelerator

KW - compiler

U2 - 10.1109/DAC18074.2021.9586095

DO - 10.1109/DAC18074.2021.9586095

M3 - Conference contribution

SN - 978-1-6654-3275-7

SP - 343

EP - 348

BT - 2021 58th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)

PB - IEEE

T2 - 58th Design Automation Conference

Y2 - 5 December 2021 through 9 December 2021

ER -

New Regular Expressions on Old Accelerators

Abstract

Publication series

Conference

Keywords

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Cite this