A GPU-accelerated Data Transformation Framework Rooted in Pushdown Transducers

Abstract

With the rise of machine learning and data analytics, the ability to process large and diverse sets of data efficiently has become crucial. Research has shown that data transformation is a key performance bottleneck for applications across a variety of domains, from data analytics to scientific computing. Custom hardware accelerators and GPU implementations targeting specific data transformation tasks can alleviate the problem, but suffer from narrow applicability and lack of generality.To tackle this problem, we propose a GPU-accelerated data transformation engine grounded on pushdown transducers. We define an extended pushdown transducer abstraction (effPDT) that allows expressing a wide range of data transformations in a memory-efficient fashion, and is thus amenable for GPU deployment. The effPDT execution engine utilizes a data streaming model that reduces the application’s memory requirements significantly, facilitating deployment on high- and low-end systems. We showcase our GPU-accelerated engine on a diverse set of transformation tasks covering data encoding/decoding, parsing and querying of structured data, and matrix transformation, and we evaluate it against publicly available CPU and GPU library implementations of the considered data transformation tasks. To understand the benefits of the effPDT abstraction, we extend our data transformation engine to also support finite state transducers (FSTs), we map the considered data transformation tasks on FSTs, and we compare the performance and resource requirements of the FST-based and the effPDT-based implementations.