Louis Woods, Jens Teubner, Gustavo Alonso. Real-time pattern matching with FPGAs. In Serge Abiteboul, Klemens Böhm, Christoph Koch, Kian-Lee Tan, editors, Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2011, April 11-16, 2011, Hannover, Germany. pages 1292-1295, IEEE Computer Society, 2011. [doi]
We demonstrate a hardware implementation of a complex event processor, built on top of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Compared to CPU-based commodity systems, our solution shows distinctive advantages for stream monitoring tasks, e.g., wire-speed processing and predictable performance.
The demonstration is based on a query-to-hardware compiler for complex event patterns that we presented at VLDB 2010. By example of a click stream monitoring application, we illustrate the inner workings of our compiler and indicate how FPGAs can act as efficient and reliable processors for event streams.