Patent ID: 8239570

Claim:
A method, comprising: maintaining link information for a plurality of links to at least one target node indicating for each link a send throughput indicating a throughput for sending data on the link for send tasks queued on the link to send data on the link to a receiving node, a receive throughput indicating a throughput for receiving data on the link for receive tasks queued on the link to receive data on the link from a sending node, a state of the link indicating whether the link is online, offline or degraded; processing a send operation to transfer data to a receiving node comprising one of the target nodes; determining the states of the links to the receiving node in response to the send operation; processing the send throughput of the links, as part of processing of the send operation, having the online state to select one of the links to the receiving node in response to determining that more than one of the links has the online state; sending the data of the send operation using the selected link to the receiving node; processing a receive operation to access data from a sending node comprising one of the target nodes; determining the state of the links to the sending node in response to the receive operation; processing the receive throughput to select one of the links having the online state, as part of processing of the receive operation, to the sending node in response to determining that more than one of the links has the online state; and receiving the data of the receive operation using the selected link to the sending node.