1. A scalable computer system, comprising: an interconnect bus; a host processor coupled to the interconnect bus; and one or more function-specific processors including network processor, a file processor and a storage processor, the one or more function-specific processors coupled to the interconnect bus for communicating with other processors, each function-specific processor having a buffer memory coupled thereto, the buffer memory having one or more segments which serve as function-specific caches to cache function specific data including network processing data, file processing data and storage processing data, the segments being dynamically allocatable to different processors.