A computer system may comprise a plurality of cores that may process the tasks determined by the operating system. A network device may direct a first set of packets to a first core using a flow-spreading technique such as receive side scaling (RSS). However, the operating system may re-provision a task from the first core to a second core to balance the load, for example, on the computer system. The operating system may determine an identifier of the second core using a new data field in the socket calls to track the identifier of the second core. The operating system may provide the identifier of the second core to a network device. The network device may then direct a second set of packets to the second core using the identifier of the second core.