Give more CPU to a process

I have a program which i have created to analyse a dataset, there is a lot of computation involved so its taking a long time to complete.
When it is running, if i look at the activity monitor, my program says its taking up 163.3% under the CPU column. At the bottom it gives a breakdown of System, User and idle %. User is around 34% and Idle is 52%. Is there any way of allocating more CPU time, in the hope it will speed up the computation of my program?

It is running on an iMac 2.7GHz with OSX 10.9.

If no other program is running, technically your program can use ALL of the CPU time available. If, however, the CPU is idle while your program is running, then your code isn't efficient and has states in which it is waiting for information and thus isn't running.

Look at your program and minimize any waits, loops and ensure all of your accesses are done efficiently. If you need to load data to analyze, if possible, load all of it into memory so that the CPU can spend all of it's time analyzing it as opposed to loading more data..

hmmm, I'm running a MATLAB script. The data is loaded in at the start and then it is accessed within a loop, the data is accessed thousands of times but it is only loaded once.

OK, if the loading is done once it may be a matter of how efficiently Matlab is running your script and iterating over the data..

What was the System % when your script was running?

System was about 13-14%

How much RAM do have and how is it being utilized? Also, is your MATLAB taking advantage of multiple cores?