Scaling out speculative execution of finite-state machines with parallel merge

A finite-state machine (FSM) is a key component for many important applications, such as Huffman decoding, regular expression matching and HTML tokenization. Due to its inherent dependencies and unpredictable memory access pattern, FSM computations are considered to be extremely difficult to parallelize. As such, significant research efforts have been made to accelerate FSM computations. Although they achieve promising performance results on multi-core machines, these methods are not scalable for emerging many-core architectures such as the GPUs.