A system and method for performing similarity searching is disclosed wherein programmable logic devices such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can be used to implement Bloom filters for identifying possible matches between a query and data. The Bloom filters can be implemented in a parallel architecture where the different parallel Bloom filters share access to the same memory units. Further, a hash table may be generated to map a set of strings to keys. In other examples, the hash table may be used to map a set of substrings to a position in a larger string.