17. The system of claim 16 , wherein the packet stream is initially received by a general purpose processor.
16. A context-based packet pattern matching system comprising: one or more processors of an acceleration device; one or more internal data storage devices operatively coupled to the one or more processors and storing: a pre-matching module and a correlation module configured to perform pre-match processing by: identifying one or more packets within a packet stream that satisfy one or more conditions of a plurality of predefined conditions specified by a rule; identifying for a full-match processing stage a candidate packet of the one or more packets that satisfies all of the plurality of predefined conditions by correlating the one or more satisfied conditions of the candidate packet; and generating for use b the full-match processing stage a matching token and a corresponding location of the matching token within the candidate packet for each of the plurality of predefined conditions; and a processing module configured to perform the full-match processing stage including determining whether the candidate packet meets the rule by performing the match processing stage including fetching and executing special purpose context-aware pattern matching and parsing (CPMP) instructions to perform context-aware pattern matching processing on the packet, wherein the context-aware pattern matching processing includes one or more of string matching regular expression matching and packet field value matching based on, for each of the plurality of predefined conditions, corresponding contextual information provided by the rule, the matching token and the corresponding location.