Many of today’s most difficult computing problems require petabyte-scale search and analysis on unstructured data, which may be text or other symbolic data. This class of computation is not handled well by traditional CPU and memory system architectures; it requires a fundamentally new approach to computing. The Micron Automata Processor (AP) is a completely new architecture for accelerating the analysis of information and generating statistical characterizations of that data. It scales to tens of thousands, even millions of processing elements for the largest challenges, with energy efficiency far greater than traditional CPUs and GPUs. It is much easier to program than FPGAs. The AP adds new thrust to this class of computing. It’s a disruptive acceleration technology that can dramatically improve throughput in many Big Data application domains.
The Automata Processor (AP) is a software-programmable silicon device, providing immensely parallel search, pattern-matching and analysis. It is designed for complex, unstructured data streams, such as text or other symbolic data. The processor leverages Micron’s expertise in the intrinsic parallelism of DRAM architectures to provide uniquely fast and highly scalable level throughput, plus extreme cost-effectiveness and energy-efficiency. It has a linear-scalable, two-dimensional fabric comprised of thousands to millions of interconnected symbol processing elements. What is unique is that each incoming symbol can be accessed by any of the compute elements in the huge array, on every clock edge. Combining simultaneous delivery of input symbols with single-clock-cycle processing enables predictable, finite execution time and massive throughput. Micron’s Software Development Kit (SDK) allows modular macros to be created, perfected, and replicated, enabling collaborative re-use in increasing scales of parallelism. The SO-DIMM board form factor makes it easy to provision PCIe adapters with the compute power needed, so it can fit in full-size GPU slots, down to the smallest server mezzanine slots. Micron’s initial development board will be a PCIE express board loaded with up to 32 AP processors. The AP is truly a massively parallel and powerful computing system available at a fraction of the cost and power of conventional computational clusters.