Patent ID: 7257572

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving a key, wherein a value is capable of being generated from the key and an input string corresponding to a packet; computing intermediary values based on substrings of the key and substrings of the input string; storing the intermediary values in a data structure at boot time, wherein the stored intermediary values are capable of being used to generate the value; receiving the input string; performing exclusive OR operations on selected intermediary values based on bits in the received input string; computing the value by aggregating results obtained from the stored intermediary values in the data structure, subsequent to the performing of the exclusive OR operations; and queuing the packet corresponding to the received input string to a corresponding processor of a plurality of processors, wherein the queuing of the packet is based on the value, wherein the key is a secret key generated by an operating system, and wherein the receiving, computing, and storing are performed by an application in a computational platform including a network interface hardware that does not provide support for receive side scaling.