Micron Technology has made available the evaluation version of the Automata Processor (AP) software development kit (SDK). With the new SDK, developers can design and test advanced applications in areas such as bioinformatics, video/image analytics, and network security, which require high performance, computational efficiency and highly parallel processing capabilities.

Micron announced the AP, a new parallel processing architecture, to the industry at the 2013 Supercomputing Conference.

Many of today's most difficult computing problems require petabyte-scale search and analysis on unstructured data, which may be text or other symbolic data. This class of computation is not handled well by traditional CPU and memory system architectures.

The Automata Processor (AP) is a new architecture for regular expression acceleration, including analysis, statistics, and logic operations. It scales to tens of thousands, even millions of processing elements for the largest challenges, with energy efficiency far greater than traditional CPUs and GPUs. The technology is fundamentally built on memory technology, but it is a processor, not a storage device. It will be probably won’t be commercially released until next year.

AP can work to supplement a server’s main processor, rather than replace it, executing select tasks with more computational and energy efficiency AP is also designed to be able to execute the same instruction across multiple sets of data, potentially making it a lower-power alternative to traditional processors for tasks such as graph analysis, pattern matching and data and graph analysis.

Micron has also partnered with the University of Virginia to found the Center for Automata Processing, to provide a home for researching and teaching how the technology can be used.

The AP SDK is currently available through Micron's developer portal. It includes a visual code editor, a compiler, a rules checker and an AP simulator.