MS160SE info

The MS160SE is a PC ISA card with up to 320 MB RAM, an MS160 search chip, and a data pump capable of putting 160MB/s of data through the MS160 chip.

The MS160 chip was developed by the Algorithm Construction Group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology under the guidance of Professor Arne Halaas.

The data is organized into eight columns on the card, each one byte wide. The data pump reads from those 8 columns in parallel, and feeds the MS160 chip with 64 bits of data 20 million times per seconds. Each column is routed to one or more of 8 search windows, each capable of matching the 32 bytes of it's data stream against upper and lower boundaries of unsigned arithmetic units from 8 to 64 bits in size. Whenever certain combinations of the search windows register a match, the chip reports a hit, giving the relative address of the data item of interest.

For simple searches (e.g. substring), each column of the data can be routed to a separate search window. This gives a search speed of of 160 MB/s.
For more complex searches (e.g. regexp), several windows may be needed to form the search criterium. If 2 windows are needed, only 4 of the 8 columns of data given to the MS160 chip are used. The data in the other 4 columns is ignored. This gives a search speed of 80 MB/s.

The card uses technology from 1992, and should cost no more than about 150 USD (RAM excluded).

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