String Matching on a Multicore GPU Using CUDA

Abstract

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have evolved over the past few years from dedicated graphics rendering devices to powerful parallel processors, outperforming traditional central processing units (CPUs) in many areas of scientific computing. The use of GPUs as processing elements was very limited until recently, when the concept of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) was introduced. GPGPU made possible to exploit the processing power and the memory bandwidth of the GPUs with the use of APIs that hide the GPU hardware from programmers. This paper presents experimental results on the parallel processing for some well known on-line string matching algorithms using one such GPU abstraction API, the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA).