There is no "warp 9" button
At least I haven't seen one yet.
That depends on your code efficiency and your settings for the OS. Different OS'es have different tuning options. No offense, but I guess it's primarily the code you use since the hardware sounds somewhat powerful. There is a lot of people here in the forum that are good at Perl - maybe you post your code if it is not tons of pages of code here with the fancy [ code ] and [ /code ] tags so they can give a small hint.
Also you can give a snippet of the input file and the desired output. Maybe people can just give an alternative.
For your current setting, have the time written down (use the "time" command in front of the line when you start the script) to compare it after tuning/using alternatives.