Efficient Parallel Architecture of SWAF for Multi-core Systems

Abstract

Multi-core systems and multi-core servers are present in almost all data cen- ters now-a-days. All major processor vendors are producing multi-core chips. These multi-core systems are commonly used to deploy high end applications such as rewalls. However the capacity of a system cannot by fully utilized unless and until application running on the system is not capable of utiliz- ing it. So multi-threaded application architecture is need for mission critical systems like SWAF (Semantic Web Application Firewall). Fully parallelized application running on multi-core system achieves high performance. To de- sign fully parallelized SWAF, all di erent modules need to run concurrently. Furthermore each module has to have its own thread pool containing mul- tiple numbers of threads which are responsible for performing tasks speci c to that module. The research challenges faced while designing such archi- tecture includes reducing the SWAF's complexity, minimizing the increased inter-modular communication and most importantly usage of di erent opti- mized techniques to remove sequential dependencies among di erent mod- ules. Each module places intermediate result in a memory bu er so that the other module can read it and perform further tasks on it. JVM (Java Virtual Machine) manages and distributes the thread pools to the available cores of the system and assures to run each module on di erent core of the machine concurrently. The system has been evaluated on both low and high loads to test the performance. At low load of requests, old architecture gave better results than the proposed one. The reason was the increased communication between di erent modules of SWAF. The test results at high load of requests proved that multi-core SWAF gave consistent behavior where as old SWAF code become irresponsive at high loads.