How to cite this paper

Salz, Richard, Heather Achilles and David Maze. “Hardware and software trade-offs in the IBM DataPower XML XG4 processor card.” Presented at International Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently: Overcoming Limits on Space, Time, or Bandwidth, Montréal, Canada, August 10, 2009. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently: Overcoming Limits on Space, Time, or Bandwidth. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 4 (2009). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol4.Salz01.

International Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently: Overcoming Limits on Space, Time, or Bandwidth
August 10, 2009

Balisage Paper: Hardware and software trade-offs in the IBM DataPower XML XG4 processor card

Richard Salz

IBM Academy

Heather Achilles

IBM Academy

David Maze

IBM Academy

Abstract

This presentation will discuss some of the hardware and software trade-offs in the IBM DataPower XML processor, known as the XG4. The XG4 is a PCI card that parses XML, and supports XPath, schema validation, and has a generic post-processing engine. It can return events like SAX, build a tree like a DOM, or switch between modes within a document. It is capable of supporting thousands of sessions simultaneously, and because of its pipeline nature can process more than one character per clock tick. The talk will explain some of the features in the card and its device driver, such as memory usage and zero-copy, synchronization of QName identifiers between card and software, and the programmability.