Hardware Design for C-Based Complex Event Processing

Abstract

Complex event processing (CEP) is a new computing paradigm that extracts meaningful information from a sequence of events in real-time application domains. Existing software-based CEP systems, however, suffer from poor event processing performance because such real-time application domains require high performance. Recent promising approaches would seem to be use of FPGAs in order to accelerate event processing performance. This chapter presents an efficient complex event processing framework, designed to process a large number of sequential events on FPGAs. Key to the success of our work is logic automation generated with our C-based event language. With this language, we have achieved both higher event processing performance and higher flexibility for application designs than those with SQL-based CEP systems. Evaluations on an FPGA-based NIC show that we have achieved 12.3 times better event processing performance than does CPU software in a financial trading application.