Alacritech, Inc.

Mehul Kharidia

Millind Mittal

Tarun Kumar Tripathy

J Sukarno Mertoguno

Amod Bodas

A functional-level instruction-set computing (FLIC) architecture executes higher-level functional instructions such as lookups and bit-compares of variable-length operands. Each FLIC processing-engine slice has specialized processing units including a lookup unit that searches for a matching entry in a lookup cache. Variable-length operands are stored in execution buffers. The operand length and location in the execution buffer are stored in fixed-length general-purpose registers (GPRs) that also store fixed-length operands. A copy/move unit moves data between input and output buffers and one or more FLIC processing-engine slices. Multiple contexts can each have a set of GPRs and execution buffers. An expansion buffer in a FLIC slice can be allocated to a context to expand that context's execution buffer for storing longer operands. The FLIC engine is optimized to parse, lookup, and process long strings common in content-service requests and can offload file-server requests by looking up meta-data and pointers.

Functional-level instruction-set computer architecture for processing application-layer content-service requests such as file-access requests

A processor natively executes lookup instructions. The lookup instruction is decoded to determine which general-purpose register (GPR) contains a pointer to a lookup key in a buffer. A variable-length key is read from the buffer and hashed to generate an index into a first-level cache and a hashed tag. An address of a bucket of entries for the index is generated and tags from these entries are read and compared to the hashed tag. When an entry matches the hashed tag, a second-level entry is read. A stored key from the second-level entry is compared to the input key to determine a match. The addresses of the matching second-level and first-level entries are written to GPR's specified by operands decoded from the lookup instruction. When the key or entry data is long, the second-level entry also contains a pointer to a key extension or data extension in a third-level cache.

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Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Mehul Kharidia