Patent ID: 7386616

Claim:
A method of providing load balanced processing of operations, comprising: receiving a sequence of operation requests from one or more clients; providing load balanced processing of the sequence of operation requests and avoiding load imbalances among a set of servers, including processing each operation request of the sequence of operation requests in accordance with current workloads of the set of servers, the processing of a respective operation request from a respective client including: determining a set of files the operation requires; distributing the operation over a plurality of servers in accordance with the current workloads, including, for each file in a plurality of files, in the set of files, separately determining a current workload for each server having a copy of the file, and dispatching a request that identifies the operation and the file, to a server that has a copy of the file and minimum current workload; receiving intermediate results from each dispatched request; processing the intermediate results into a single result set; and returning the single result set to the respective client.