Patent ID: 8370528

Claim:
A network device comprising: a plurality of blades, each blade comprising a physical card having a plurality of compute elements interconnected by a hardware switching fabric to communicate packet data between the compute elements, wherein the set of compute elements of each of the blades performs a set of network services on the packet data, and wherein the set of compute elements in each of the blades is arranged in a processing pipeline to provide the set of network services; a flow control element to receive a plurality of packet flows from a network and distribute each of the plurality of packet flows to a corresponding one of the processing pipelines provided by the blades, wherein the flow control element distributes packets of the same packet flow to the same processing pipeline of the blades, wherein the flow control element identifies each of the packet flows as being associated with a subscriber and determines a subset of the network services that are required to be applied to packet flows associated with the identified subscriber, and wherein, for each of the packet flows, the flow control element selects one of the processing pipelines based on the subset of network services identified for the subscriber.