A high performance network adapter is provided for forwarding traffic and providing adaptation between packetized memory fragment based processor links of multiple CPUs and multiple switch planes of a packet switching network. The aperture circumscribes a target focal point, and directs a light to the detection device. Another aspect of the present invention relates to a mechanism which allows for load balancing operations to be implemented using source-side information which is embedded into the destination IP address of a packet header. A learning with forgetting algorithm is used to apply a decay to the elements of the transform matrix and select a transform matrices which solve an optimization problem.