Energy-Efficient Adaptive Hardware Accelerator for Text Mining Application Kernels

Abstract

Text mining is a growing field of applications, which enables the analysis of large text data sets using statistical methods. In recent years, exponential increase in the size of these data sets has strained existing systems, requiring more computing power, server hardware, networking interconnects, and power consumption. For practical reasons, this trend cannot continue in the future. Instead, we propose a reconfigurable hardware accelerator designed for text analytics systems, which can simultaneously improve performance and reduce power consumption. Situated near the last level of memory, it mitigates the need for high-bandwidth processor-to-memory connections, instead capitalizing on close data proximity, massively parallel operation, and analytic-inspired functional units to maximize energy efficiency, while remaining flexible to easily map common text analytic kernels. A field-programmable gate array-based emulation framework demonstrates the functional correctness of the system, and a full eight-core accelerator is synthesized for power, area, and delay estimates. The accelerator can achieve two to three orders of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency versus CPU and general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPU) for various text mining kernels. As a case study, we demonstrate how indexing performance of Lucene, a popular text search and analytics platform, can be improved by an average of 70% over CPU and GPU while significantly reducing data transfer energy and latency.