Patent ID: 7130938

Claim:
A method of identifying communications adapters of a computing environment, said method comprising: executing a program within a node of the computing environment, said node comprising an input/output subsystem having one or more communications adapters to access one or more input/output devices defined outside of the node, said one or more communications adapters being coupled to the one or more input/output devices via one or more input/output paths, wherein at least a portion of an input/output path is defined outside of the node, and wherein the program accesses an input/output device outside of the node via a communications adapter of the one or more communications adapters, said program selecting the communications adapter to be used to access the input/output device by identifying the selected communications adapter via a first intranodal identifier, said first intranodal identifier being a logical identifier for the communications adapter; and mapping the first intranodal identifier used by the program to a second intranodal identifier different from the first intranodal identifier, said second intranodal identifier being a physical identifier used by hardware within the node to identify the communications adapter selected by the program to access the input/output device, said mapping specifying one physical identifier of a plurality of physical identifiers that is predefined as the one physical identifier corresponding to the logical identifier used by the program, and wherein the first intranodal identifier and the second intranodal identifier identify the same communications adapter selected by the program, wherein the input/output subsystem is configured as a plurality of input/output subsystem images, wherein each input/output (I/O) subsystem image of multiple input/output subsystem images of the plurality of I/O subsystem images appears to one or more programs of the computing environment as a complete input/output subsystem, and wherein each input/output subsystem image of the multiple input/output subsystem images comprises a plurality of physical communications adapters to access one or more input/output devices via a plurality of input/output paths, and wherein a specific first intranodal identifier is used by a program of an I/O subsystem image of the plurality of I/O subsystem images to refer to a specific communications adapter of the plurality of communications adapters, wherein the same specific first intranodal identifier is used by a program of another I/O subsystem image of the plurality of I/O subsystem images to refer to a different communications adapter of the plurality of communications adapters, and wherein the mapping maps the plurality of first intranodal identifiers that are the same to a plurality of second intranodal identifiers that are different.