MXQuery with Hardware Acceleration

Abstract

We demonstrate MXQuery/H, a modified version of MXQuery that uses hardware acceleration to speed up XML processing. The main goal of this demonstration is to give an interactive example of hardware/software co-design and show how system performance and energy efficiency can be improved by off-loading tasks to FPGA hardware. To this end, we equipped MXQuery/H with various hooks to inspect the different parts of the system. Besides that, our system can finally really leverage the idea of XML projection. Though the idea of projection had been around for a while, its effectiveness remained always limited because of the unavoidable and high parsing overhead. By performing the task in hardware, we relieve the software part from this overhead and achieve processing speed-ups of several factors.