PROCESSING PACKET SEQUENCE USING SAME FUNCTION SET PIPELINED MULTIPLE THREADS SPANNING OVER MULTIPLE PROCESSING ENGINES AND HAVING EXCLUSIVE DATA ACCESS

A system and method for employing multiple hardware contexts and programming engines in a functional pipeline partitioned to facilitate high performance data processing. The system and method includes processing a sequence of packets with a sequence of threads, with the sequence of threads spanning multiple programmable processing elements integrated within a processor, and with the programmable processing elements providing multiple threads of execution such that each of the threads acquires exclusive modification access to data shared.