Towards highly parallel event processing through reconfigurable hardware

Abstract

We present fpga-ToPSS (Toronto Publish/Subscribe System), an efficient event processing platform to support high-frequency and low-latency event matching. fpga-ToPSS is built over reconfigurable hardware—FPGAs—to achieve line-rate processing by exploring various degrees of parallelism. Furthermore, each of our proposed FPGA-based designs is geared towards a unique application requirement, such as flexibility, adaptability, scalability, or pure performance, such that each solution is specifically optimized to attain a high level of parallelism. Therefore, each solution is formulated as a design trade-off between the degree of parallelism versus the desired application requirement. Moreover, our event processing engine supports Boolean expression matching with an expressive predicate language applicable to a wide range of applications including real-time data analysis, algorithmic trading, targeted advertisement, and (complex) event processing.