Snowfall: Hardware Stream Analysis Made Easy

In this demonstration, we showcase Snowfall, a compiler tool for low-level stream analysis. Comparable to scanner generators for software-based systems (e.g., lex/flex), Snowfall can be used to decode incoming data streams in hardware, react to low-level patterns in a stream, and perform initial input data analysis. Snowfall plays well together with Glacier, a query-to-hardware compiler that we described and demonstrated in [MTA09, MTA10]. A typical use case is to use Snowfall for input parsing and pre-processing, then perform SQL-style query processing on top with a hardware query plan obtained with help of Glacier.