An FPGA-based High-Throughput Stream Join Architecture

Stream join is a fundamental operation that combines information from different high-speed and high-volume data streams. This paper presents an FPGA-based architecture that maps the most performance-efficient stream join algorithm, i.e. ScaleJoin, to reconfigurable logic. The system was fully implemented on a Convey HC-2ex hybrid computer and the experimental performance evaluation shows that the proposed system outperforms by up to one order of magnitude the corresponding fully optimized parallel software-based solution running on a high-end 48-core multiprocessor platform. The proposed architecture can be used as a generic template for mapping stream processing algorithms to reconfigurable logic, taking into consideration real-world challenges.