1. A method for operating a rule-based system, the method comprising: receiving a data stream within the rule-based system, the data stream comprising data representative of a plurality of events, the rule-based system being configured with a plurality of rules, each rule having at least one pre-defined rule condition, the rule-based system comprising a coprocessor, the coprocessor comprising a plurality of parallel processing paths, at least one of the parallel processing paths comprising a plurality of pipelined processing modules, the pipelined processing modules comprising a filtering module, a windowing module downstream from the filtering module, and a rule condition checking module downstream from the filtering module, and wherein at least another of the parallel processing paths comprises a rule condition checking module; within the at least one parallel processing path: the filtering module of the at least one parallel processing path filtering at least a portion of the data stream to pass a subset of the data stream; the rule condition checking module of the at least one parallel processing path processing the filtered data stream to perform a rule condition check operation thereon to generate a rule condition check result corresponding to at least one of the rule conditions; the windowing module of the at least one parallel processing path caching event data corresponding to the filtered data stream, the cached event data comprising event data for a plurality of the events, the cached event data for use with a rule condition check operation that requires consideration of a plurality of events to determine whether a rule condition is satisfied; within the at least another parallel processing path: the rule condition checking module of the at least another parallel processing path processing at least a portion of the data stream to perform a different rule condition check operation thereon to generate a rule condition check result corresponding to at least one of the other rule conditions; the plurality of parallel processing paths thereby simultaneously performing a plurality of different rule condition check operations on the data stream to thereby generate a plurality of rule condition check results corresponding to the rules for the data stream in parallel.