Intel Acquires InfiniBand Assets from QLogic to Redefine High Performance Computing

Aiming to become a player in supercomputing in the next few years, Intel (News - Alert) is adding a networking fabric technology to its networking portfolio. The semiconductor giant acquired QLogic’s InfiniBand product line and some assets for $125 million. The two entered into a definitive agreement on Monday. According to Qlogic, the deal is expected to close by the end of this quarter, if regulatory requirements and other customary closing conditions are met.

Intel said that a significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to join Intel. With this acquisition, the company is strengthening its fabric technology because going forward there will be a need for tighter coupling between processors and fabric switching, said Intel.

In fact, according to Intel, this acquisition supports the company’s vision of innovating on fabric architectures to achieve ExaFLOPS performance by 2018. An ExaFLOPS is a quintillion computer operations per second, a hundred times more than today’s fastest supercomputers.

In a statement, Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center and Connected System Group, said,  “At the International Supercomputing Conference 2011, Intel unveiled a bold vision to redefine high performance computing (HPC) performance and break the Exascale barrier by 2018.” He added, “The technology and expertise from QLogic provide important assets to provide the scalable system fabric needed to execute on this vision.”

Wired magazine quoted Skaugen, as saying, “In six years, the 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world will use about half as many processors as Intel’s server group sold in all of 2011.” Looking at analyst firm Gartner’s (News - Alert) data, we’re talking about somewhere north of 7 million processors. That means billions of dollars in sales for Intel,” asserted Skaugen.

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