Assessing document relevance with run-time reconfigurable machines

Free text database searching is a natural candidate for acceleration by run time reconfigurable custom computing machines. We describe a fully pipelined search machine architecture for scoring the relevance of textual documents against approximately 100 relevant target words, with provision for limited regular expression matching and error tolerance. An implementation on the SPACE custom computing platform indicates that throughput in the order of 20 megabytes per second is achievable on ALgotronix FPGAs if a locally synchronous design style is adopted and global communications minimized. Partial reconfiguration of the datapath at run time, in around 3 seconds, serves to maximize the density of data storage on the machine and correspondingly avoid costly input from the environment.