HAJPAQUE: Hardware Accelerator for JSON Parsing, Querying and Schema Validation

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is quickly becoming the default currency for semi-structured data exchange on the web; hence, it is heavily used in analytics pipelines. State-of-the-art analytics pipelines can now process data at a rate that exceeds 50 Gbps owing to recent advances in RDMA, NVM, and network technology (notably Infiniband). The peak throughput of the best-performing software solutions for parsing, querying, and validating JSON data is 20 Gbps, which is far lower than the current requirement. We propose a novel HW-based accelerator, HAJPAQUE, that ingests 16-bytes of JSON data at a time and processes all the 16 bytes in parallel as opposed to competing approaches that process such data byte by byte. Our novel solution comprises lookup tables, parallel sliding windows, and recursive computation. Together, they ensure that our online pipeline does not encounter any stalls while performing all the operations on JSON data. We ran experiments on several widely used JSON benchmarks/datasets and demonstrated that we can parse and query JSON data at 106 Gbps (@28 nm).