Programming Techniques for the Automata Processor

The Micron Automata Processor (AP) is a novel co-processor accelerator that supports the parallel execution of multiple Nondeterministic Finite Automata (NFA) programmed directly into hardware over a single data-stream. In this talk, I will give an introduction to the processor and then present a number of programming techniques to develop automata that execute efficiently on this processor. First, I will present general techniques to transform NFAs defined in their classical representation to the representation used by the AP, and optimize the same. Then, I will talk about automata development techniques using simple but powerful generic building blocks.