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.
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This content will become publicly available on October 13, 2025
A Transducers-based Programming Framework for Efficient Data Transformation
Many data analytics and scientific applications rely on data transformation tasks, such as encoding, decoding, parsing of structured and unstructured data, and conversions between data formats and layouts. Previous work has shown that data transformation can represent a performance bottleneck for data analytics workloads. The transducers computational abstraction can be used to express a wide range of data transformations, and recent efforts have proposed configurable engines implementing various transducer models (from finite state transducers, to pushdown transducers, to extended models). This line of research, however, is still at an early stage. Notably, expressing data transformation using transducers requires a paradigm shift, impacting programmability. To address this problem, we propose a programming framework to map data transformation tasks onto a variety of transducer models. Our framework includes: (1) a platform agnostic programming language (xPTLang) to code transducer programs using intuitive programming constructs, and (2) a compiler that, given an xPTLang program, generates efficient transducer processing engines for CPU and GPU. Our compiler includes a set of optimizations to improve code efficiency. We demonstrate our framework on a diverse set of data transformation tasks on an Intel CPU and an Nvidia GPU.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1907863
- PAR ID:
- 10548597
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400706318
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 66 to 77
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Long Beach CA USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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