Patent ID: 7724670

Claim:
A system comprising a virtual connectivity grid overlaid on a physical network in which nodes are coupled to one or more physical switches through respective physical interfaces, the virtual connectivity grid including virtual interfaces overlaid over the node physical interfaces so as to provide communicative coupling of the nodes to one or more virtual networks established within the virtual connectivity grid, the communicative coupling being established by virtual links arranged so as to emulate physical connections in a desired connectivity pattern, wherein the system is implemented using a plurality of stand-alone general purpose and/or special purpose computers having software stored therein as the nodes and local area network (LAN) switches that support virtual local area networks (VLANs) and jumbo frames as the one or more physical switches, the software comprises flow management software configured to cause the computers to adaptively route data flows through a multi-stage network defined by the virtual connectivity grid, and each stage of the multi-stage network comprises a cluster of similarly configured applications performing one or more network services.