Fw: [xml-dev] XML parsing @ 100MB-1000MB/sec/GHz with Parallel Bit Streams

One aspect of the ongoing debate about the pros and cons of standardizing 
"Efficient XML Interchange" (EXI) involves the question of: if XML isn't 
running fast enough for some purpose now, how much of that slowness is 
inherent in XML itself, and how much is attributable to lack of 
optimization of the processing software.  Our XML Screamer work has often 
been cited as one point of reference as to how fast XML 1.0 can be parsed, 
validated, and processed.  Attached is a note that Rob Cameron of Simon 
Fraser University just sent to xml-dev.  He reports on an open-source XML 
implementation that uses the SIMD (parallel) features of modern processor 
chips to run several times faster than XML Screamer.  So, in addition to 
being a really nice piece of work, this seems to confirm that the 
performance we reported for XML Screamer is probably conservative.   Also, 
Rob has done his work in an open source implementation that should make it 
easier for others to check and reproduce his results.  For what it's 
worth, my personal conclusion has been and is that speed alone is in most 
cases not enought to justify standardizing something like EXI:  if there 
is enough demand for a system that combines compression with speed, then 
there may indeed be justification for standardizing EXI, but my intuition 
is that we should look primarily to use cases where size as well as raw 
speed is important.

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------




----- Forwarded by Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM on 02/25/2008 04:14 PM 
-----


Rob Cameron <cameron@cs.sfu.ca>
02/25/2008 08:13 AM
 
        To:     xml-dev@lists.xml.org
        cc:     (bcc: Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM)
        Subject:        [xml-dev] XML parsing @ 100MB-1000MB/sec/GHz with 
Parallel Bit Streams


I am pleased to announce the availability of parabix-0.40, a 
high-performance
XML parsing engine prototype that can parse text-oriented XML document
on commodity processors at over 200MB/sec per processor GHz and 
data-oriented XML documents at speeds approaching that.    At this point, 
this includes correct parsing of correct documents and dispatch to markup 
action routines using an in-line API for XML (ilax).    As the parabix 
stack 
is built out to incorporate validation and object creation, I am expecting
overall performance above 100MB/sec/GHz.  With linear speed-up on
multicore processors and other improvements, 1000MB/sec/GHz is 
forseeable.

By way of comparison, XML Screamer (Koustalas et al, WWW 2006) performs
parsing, validation and business object creation on commodity processors 
at
the rate of 23-46 MB/sec per processor GHz (MB/sec/GHz), a substantial
increase over the cited rate of 2.5-6 MB/sec/GHz for traditional 
validating
parsers.

This is very good performance for traditional character-at-a-time parsing,
taking advantage of a collection of techniques such as optimization
across layers and schema-based customization.  As a benchmark, 
100 MB/sec/GHz is cited as the limit on throughput achievable for a
simple character-at-a-time scanning loop.

My research is investigating the development of very high-speed text
processing based on a fundamentally new approach:  using parallel bit
streams to represent character data and the SIMD processor capabilities
of commodity CPUs to process these bit streams.

I have first applied these techniques to the problem of UTF-8 to
UTF-16 transcoding, to achieve end-to-end speed-up of 3X to 25X
compared with standard iconv and similar implementations.   The 
open source implementation of u8u16 is available at
http://u8u16.costar.sfu.ca/ and the results have just been
presented to ACM PPoPP 2008 in Salt Lake City.

Parabix (parallel bit streams for XML) is a research prototype that is
nevertheless being designed to become the basis for a full XML
processing stack.  The working code repository is now available
as an open source code base under OSL 3.0. 
http://parabix.costar.sfu.ca/

I am hoping to accelerate development of parabix technology through the
open source model as well as continuing the academic research project
with a team of graduate students who are coming up to speed.    I have
also created a spin-off company to oversee commercial development
of the technology.

However, in the context of discussion of XML performance issues and
the next ten years of development of XML technology, I think that
the work is sufficiently well advanced to support the following advice:
Do not assume that XML processing performance is inherently limited
by the nature of present-day character-at-a-time parsing technology.
Intraregister and intrachip parallelism hold out a realistic promise of
dramatic performance improvement on commodity processors.
-- 
Robert D. Cameron, Ph.D.
Professor of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University
President and CTO, International Characters, Inc.


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Received on Tuesday, 26 February 2008 01:43:23 UTC