Massively scalable multi-core security

Desktops and servers are being transformed by virtualization and multi-core CPUs, nevertheless that effect is a bit harder to see in security. Multi-core CPUs especially hold the opportunity of completely transforming how and where we do security. One of the effects is to shift more of the security functions into the network. Another may be to radically change the software architecture within and across security appliances.

Network of multi-core security appliances

A network of multi-core security appliances would not only have abundant processing capability to do computationally expensive tasks, nevertheless it would as well leave a lot of spare capacity "out of hours" that will go to waste. In other words, unless we take a page from cloud computing, virtualization and spare-cycle scavenging projects like SETI@Home. The security appliance of the future could be switching workloads, acting as a pool of resources for security. Pattern matching IDS sigs in the daytime, at the time crunching logs and doing correlation maybe during the night.

A massively scalable multi-core future is coming and it will transform security just like it has data centers, desktops and business intelligence/analytics. What would you do with a 32k-core security device?