Designing a Sub-RISC Multi-Gigabit Regular Expression Processor

Andrew Christopher Mihal, Christian Sauer and Kurt Keutzer

EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley
Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2006-119
September 26, 2006

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-119.pdf

Increasingly, embedded system designers must exploit application-specific concurrency in order to obtain high performance. Often an application will exhibit several different styles and granularities of concurrency. An average embedded RISC processor is a poor platform when concurrency is a first-class concern. The Sub-RISC paradigm, on the other hand, allows designers to create programmable architectures with application-specific process-, data-, and datatype-level concurrency. This paper describes a Sub-RISC processor that accelerates regular expression matching for network intrusion detection. This processor is lightweight and can be tiled to search multiple packet streams in parallel. Unlike typical application-specific processors, designers are not burdened with assembly language programming. Instead, the language of regular expressions is used as a high-level programming abstraction. Results are shown for ASIC and FPGA implementations using regexp rules from the Snort database.


BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Mihal:EECS-2006-119,
    Author = {Mihal, Andrew Christopher and Sauer, Christian and Keutzer, Kurt},
    Title = {Designing a Sub-RISC Multi-Gigabit Regular Expression Processor},
    Institution = {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year = {2006},
    Month = {Sep},
    URL = {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-119.html},
    Number = {UCB/EECS-2006-119},
    Abstract = {Increasingly, embedded system designers must exploit application-specific concurrency in order to obtain high performance. Often an application will exhibit several different styles and granularities of concurrency. An average embedded RISC processor is a poor platform when concurrency is a first-class concern. The Sub-RISC paradigm, on the other hand, allows designers to create programmable architectures with application-specific process-, data-, and datatype-level concurrency. This paper describes a Sub-RISC processor that accelerates regular expression matching for network intrusion detection. This processor is lightweight and can be tiled to search multiple packet streams in parallel. Unlike typical application-specific processors, designers are not burdened with assembly language programming. Instead, the language of regular expressions is used as a high-level programming abstraction. Results are shown for ASIC and FPGA implementations using regexp rules from the Snort database.}
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Mihal, Andrew Christopher
%A Sauer, Christian
%A Keutzer, Kurt
%T Designing a Sub-RISC Multi-Gigabit Regular Expression Processor
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 2006
%8 September 26
%@ UCB/EECS-2006-119
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-119.html
%F Mihal:EECS-2006-119