  Automata play important roles in wide area of computing and the growth of
multicores calls for their efficient parallel implementation. Though it is
known in theory that we can perform the computation of a finite automaton in
parallel by simulating transitions, its implementation has a large overhead due
to the simulation. In this paper we propose a new automaton called simultaneous
finite automaton (SFA) for efficient parallel computation of an automaton. The
key idea is to extend an automaton so that it involves the simulation of
transitions. Since an SFA itself has a good property of parallelism, we can
develop easily a parallel implementation without overheads. We have implemented
a regular expression matcher based on SFA, and it has achieved over 10-times
speedups on an environment with dual hexa-core CPUs in a typical case.
