Gregex: GPU Based High Speed Regular Expression Matching Engine

Abstract

Regular expression matching engine is a crucial infrastructure which is widely used in network security systems, like IDS. We propose Gregex, a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) based regular expression matching engine for deep packet inspection (DPI). Gregex leverages the computational power and high memory bandwidth of GPUs by storing data in proper GPU memory space and executing massive GPU thread concurrently to process lots of packets in parallel. Three optimization techniques, ATP, CAB, and CAT are proposed to significantly improve the performance of Gregex. On a GTX260 GPU, Gregex achieves a regular matching throughput of 126.8 Gbps, which is a speedup of 210× over traditional CPU-based implementation and a speedup of 7.9× over the state-of-the-art GPU based regular expression engine.