A system includes a module associated with a first stage of a switch fabric directly coupled to a module associated with a second stage of the switch fabric via a single physical hop having multiple virtual channels. The module associated with the first stage is configured to assign a virtual channel identifier associated with a virtual channel with a data packet using a hash function and to send the data packet through the virtual channel based on the virtual channel identifier. The module associated with the second stage is configured to send a flow control signal to the module associated with the first stage when an available capacity of a queue is less than a predetermined threshold. The module associated with the first stage is configured to suspend sending data packets via the virtual channel in response to the flow control signal.