High Performance Pattern Matching Using the Automata Processor

In this paper, we study the acceleration of applications that require searching for all occurrences of thousands of string-patterns in an input data-stream, using the Automata Processor (AP). For this purpose, we use two applications from two fields, namely, network security and bioinformatics. The first application, called Fast-SNAP (for Fast-SNort using AP), scans network data for 4312 signatures of intrusion derived from the popular open-source Snort database. Using the resources of a single AP board, Fast-SNAP can scan for all these signatures at 10.3 Gbps. The second application, called PROTOMATA (for PROTein autOMATA), looks for all occurrences of 1308 protein motifs from the PROSITE database in protein sequences. PROTOMATA is up to half a million times faster than its single-CPU-based counterpart. The techniques developed to program these applications may be useful in the design and development of similar applications using this new hardware accelerator.