

Micron's Automata Exploits Parallelism to Solve Big Data Problems - hershel
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320203&

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hershel
For more details about this processor:

[http://www.micron.com/~/media/Documents/Products/Other%20Doc...](http://www.micron.com/~/media/Documents/Products/Other%20Documents/automata_processing_technical_paper.pdf)

[http://www.micron.com/~/media/Documents/Products/Other%20Doc...](http://www.micron.com/~/media/Documents/Products/Other%20Documents/automata_processing_technical_paper_supplementary_material.pdf)

Peformance:

It uses DRAM process.for a snort test(intrusion detection) this (relatively
small) chip compares to 9 large FPGA chips.it takes 1/9 of the power. They
have 8 chips on a dimm module.

Question: what are some interesting applications for this ? and how do they
map to finite automata ?

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kken
This type of processor implements nondeterministic finite state machines².
Effectively it allows you to perform regular expression matching, very fast
and on large data sets. They implemented this in a very clever way exploiting
the fact that DRAM access is extremely parallel by nature. It is useful to
solve data mining problems, such as those arising in bioinformatics.

It is quite likely that there are also certain government agencies among the
early customers...

²[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_finite_automat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_finite_automaton)

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dllthomas
Fascinating. Can we add a stack?

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kken
I believe you are thinking of a different computing paradigm.

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dllthomas
I am thinking about what it takes to turn a NFA into a push-down automata.

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tlarkworthy
I wonder if this would be good for features in computer vision too.

