There is quite a bit of work on this topic in Databases, and stream processing is one of the primary use cases they identified (in particular, if you can put th

There is quite a bit of work on this topic in Databases, and stream processing is one of the primary use cases they identified (in particular, if you can put the FPGA device between the network and the CPU, it works out quite well). This is one of the early papers: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1687730 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1687730 This one appears to be a more recent survey paper by some of those authors: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00514ED1V01Y201306DTM035 http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00514ED1V01Y2... As someone else pointed out, this was also one of Netezza's differentiation.