Dynamic Allocation of CPUs in Multicore Processor for Performance Improvement in Network Security Applications

Problem statement: Multicore and multithreaded CPUs have become the new approach for increase in the performance of the processor based systems. Numerous applications benefit from use of multiple cores. Increasing performance of the system by increasing the number of CPUs of the multicore processor for a given application warrants detailed experimentation. In this study, the results of the experimentation done by dynamic allocation/deallocation of the CPU based on the workload conditions for the packet processing for security application are analyzed and presented. Approach: This evaluation was conducted on SunfireT1000 server having Sun UltraSPARC T1 multicore processor. OpenMP tasking feature is used for scheduling the logical CPUs for the parallelized application. Dynamic allocation of a CPU to a process is done depending on the workload characterization. Results: Execution time for packet processing was analyzed to arrive at an effective dynamic allocation methodology that is dependant on the hardware and the workload. Conclusion/Recommendations: Based on the analysis, the methodology and the allocation of the number of CPUs for the parallelized application are suggested.