ANMLzoo: a benchmark suite for exploring bottlenecks in automata processing engines and architectures

High-performance automata-processing engines are traditionally evaluated using a limited set of regular expression-rulesets. While regular expression rulesets are valid real-world examples of use cases for automata processing, they represent a small proportion of all use cases for automata-based computing. With the recent availability of architectures and software frameworks for automata processing, many new applications have been found to benefit from automata processing. These show a wide variety of characteristics that differ from prior, popular regular-expression benchmarks, and these should be considered when designing new systems for automata processing. This paper presents ANMLZoo, a benchmark repository for automata-based applications as well as automata engines for both von-Neumann and reconfigurable dataflow architectures. To demonstrate the usefulness of ANMLZoo, we first characterize diversity in the benchmark suite. We then present insights from five experiments showing how ANMLZoo can be used to expose bottlenecks in both automata-processing software engines and hardware architectures.