Disclosed herein is a method and system for hardware-accelerating the generation of metadata for a data stream using a coprocessor. Using these techniques, data can be richly indexed, classified, and clustered at high speeds. Reconfigurable logic such a field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can be used by the coprocessor for this hardware acceleration. Techniques such as exact matching, approximate matching, and regular expression pattern matching can be employed by the coprocessor to generate desired metadata for the data stream.