Intel, which played a key role in the creation of the InfiniBand high-speed networking standard a decade ago, has come full circle and bought the IB assets of Qlogic, one of the two remaining companies still actively pushing this technology. While $ 125 million is chump change for a company that netted $ 3.4 billion in profits last quarter, Intel says the acquisition will enhance its networking portfolio and provide scalable high-performance computing (HPC) fabric technology as well as support the company’s vision of innovating on fabric architectures to achieve ExaFLOP/s performance by 2018. At a hundred times faster than today’s fastest supercomputers, it’s an aggressive move, seeking to accelerate performance to a quintillion computer operations per second.
Network Computing