Described herein is a method and system for directing outgoing data packets from packet engines to a transmit queue of a NIC in a multi-core system, and a method and system for directing incoming data packets from a receive queue of the NIC to the packet engines. Packet engines store outgoing traffic in logical transmit queues in the packet engines. An interface module obtains the outgoing traffic and stores it in a transmit queue of the NIC, after which the NIC transmits the traffic from the multi-core system over a network. The NIC receives incoming traffic and stores it in a NIC receive queue. The interface module obtains the incoming traffic and applies a hash to a tuple of each obtained data packet. The interface module then stores each data packet in the logical receive queue of a packet engine on the core identified by the result of the hash.