Information Retreival

University of Glasgow Researchers Attain 20x Acceleration
and 90% Power Savings for Information Retrieval Application.

In a project sponsored by Matrixware Information Services and supported by Mitrionics, researchers from the University of Glasgow conducted comparative tests to measure the performance differences between running Information Retrieval algorithms on traditional processors versus FPGAs. In these tests, the Mitrion Accelerated Computing Platform achieved a 20x performance increase and ninety percent power savings over an unaccelerated solution when running standard application algorithms for document filtering.

The full results, methodologies, and details of the study were presented by representatives from the University of Glasgow at the FPL09 Prague - 19th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications held in Prague, Czech Republic, August 31st through September 2nd, 2009. The complete study is available for download here:

 

FPGA-Acclerated Information Retrieval: High-Efficiency Document Filtering


Authors:

W. Vanderbauwhede, L. Azzopardi, and M. Moadeli from the Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow.


Abstract:
Power consumption in data centers is a growing issue as the cost of the power for computation and cooling as become dominate.  An emerging challenge is the development of "environmentally friendly" systems.  In this paper we present a novel application of FPGAs for the acceleration of Information Retrieval algorithms, specifically, filtering streams/collections of documents against topic profiles. The results show that FPGA acceleration can result in speed-ups of up to a factor of 20 for large profiles.

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