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.