Effective Utilization of Multicore Processor for Unified Threat Management Functions

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. Unified threat management is one such application that has multiple functions to be implemented at high speeds. Increasing performance of the system by knowing the nature of the functionality and effective utilization of multiple processors for each of the functions warrants detailed experimentation. In this study, some of the functions of Unified Threat Management were implemented using multiple processors for each of the functions. Approach: This evaluation was conducted on SunfireT1000 server having Sun UltraSPARC T1 multicore processor. OpenMP parallelization methods were used for scheduling the logical CPUs for the parallelized application. Results: Execution time for some of the UTM functions implemented was analyzed to arrive at an effective allocation and parallelization methodology that is dependent on the hardware and the workload. Conclusion/Recommendations: Based on the analysis, the type of parallelization method for the implemented UTM functions are suggested.