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 routing. It allows vendors or network administrators to configure the router in a way that indicates parallelizable packet processing 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, compared to 23,000 packets per second for uniprocessor Click.