Volume and irregularity effects on massively multicore packet processors

Abstract

Irregularity is a recognized problem on many- and multi-core platforms but its effect remains to be studied. This paper focuses on multicore processors and assumes that packet traffic is processed by a large number of parallel jobs in realtime, while each job is implemented as a streaming algorithm. Analysis is performed using a real-life measurement dataset collected especially for this study while irregular traffic is modeled using a hotspot distribution. Results show that massively multicore processors are affected by both the total input volume and the irregularity.