Machine Learning with Micron's Automata Processor - insideBIGDATA

A new survey paper describing Micron's Automata Processor (AP) was recently published. AP has many potential applications in data mining, bioinformatics, natural language processing, etc. Micron has recently stopped developing AP, however other companies such as Natural Intelligence Semiconductor, a spin-off from Micron) and some academic research centers (Center for Automata Processing at the University of Virginia) are leading the development and market-adoption of AP. Problems from a wide variety of application domains can be modeled as "nondeterministic finite automaton" (NFA) and hence, efficient execution of NFAs can improve the performance of several key applications. However, traditional architectures, such as CPU and GPU are not inherently suited for executing NFAs, and hence, special-purpose architectures are required for accelerating them. Micron's automata processor (AP) exploits massively parallel in-memory processing capability of DRAM for executing NFAs and hence, it can provide orders of magnitude performance improvement compared to traditional architectures.