Patent ID: 8688868

Claim:
A computer system comprising: a plurality of input-output devices including a network interface device, a chip set, a plurality of sockets, individual ones of the sockets including multiple processor cores and at least one shared cache, wherein the network interface device is to: retrieve flow information from a packet received over a network, identify a matching flow identifier entry after matching the flow information with one or more flow identifier entries in a flow table, wherein the network interface device to create the flow table before receiving the packet, store the packet in a queue identified by a queue identifier in the matching flow identifier entry, identify a first socket of the plurality of sockets and a first core of the first socket using steering values in the matching flow identifier entry, and transfer the packet from the queue to a per core cache associated with the first core of the first socket; wherein the network interface device is to generate an interrupt to the first core, wherein the first core is identified using the core identifier; and wherein the first core to service the interrupt to retrieve the packet from the per core cache of the first core.