High-Performance Regular Expression Matching with Parabix and LLVM

This thesis investigates the feasibility of constructing a high-performance, Unicode-capable, regular expression search tool by combining parallel bit stream technologies and algorithms together with the dynamic compilation capabilities of the LLVM compiler infrastructure. A prototype implementation of icGREP successfully demonstrates the feasibility of this undertaking, with asymptotic performance fully in line with that predicted by earlier prototyping work. The icGREP implementation extends the Parabix regular expression algorithms to include new techniques for efficient Unicode character matching. Performance evaluations in comparison with other Unicode-capable regular expression search tools show asymptotic performance advantages that are often over 10X, although the overhead of dynamic compilation techniques confines the benefits to relatively large input files.

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