HPXA: A highly parallel XML parser

摘要

State of the art XML parsing approaches read an XML file byte by byte, and use complex finite state machines to process each byte. In this paper, we propose a new parser, HPXA, which reads and processes 16 bytes at a time. We designed most of the components ab initio, to ensure that they can process multiple XML tokens and tags in parallel. We propose two basic elements - a sparse 1D array compactor, and a hardware unit called LTMAdder that takes its decisions based on adding the rows of a lower triangular matrix. We demonstrate that we are able to process 16 bytes in parallel with very few pipeline stalls for a suite of widely used XML benchmarks. Moreover, for a 28nm technology node, we can process XML data at 106 Gbps, which is roughly 6.5X faster than competing prior work.