Flexible Control of Parallelism in a Multiprocessor PC Router

SMP Click is a software router that provides both flexibility and high performance on stock multiprocessor PC hardware. It achieves high performance using device, buffer, and queue management techniques optimized for multiprocessor rout-ing. It allows vendors or network administrators to configure the router in a way that indicates parallelizable packet pro-cessing tasks, and adaptively load-balances those tasks across the available CPUs. SMP Click’s absolute performance is high: it can forward 494,000 64-byte IP packets per second on a 2-CPU 500 MHz Intel Xeon machine, compared to 302,000 packets per second for uniprocessor Click. SMP Click also scales well for CPU intensive tasks: 4-CPU SMP Click can encrypt and forward 87,000 64-byte packets per second using IPSec 3DES, com-pared to 23,000 packets per second for uniprocessor Click.