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ie8 fix

infiniband

InfiniBand eight years later

In October of 2000, I hopped a Las Vegas-bound flight to attend a developers' event being thrown by the InfiniBand Trade Association.

By way of background, InfiniBand was one of the hot technology properties of the pre-bubble-bursting days. It was touted as a better (faster, more efficient) way to connect servers than the ubiquitous Ethernet. Its more vocal backers, of which there were many, went so far as to position it as a "System Area Network"--a connective fabric for data centers. A whole mini-industry of silicon, software, host bus adapter, and switch vendors supported InfiniBand. One sizable … Read more

Whither Infiniband?

Back in the 1990s when the original PCI I/O bus was getting a bit long in the tooth, two disparate groups of vendors proposed solutions to the problem. Compaq, IBM and Hewlett-Packard championed a standard called Future I/O, while Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems pushed a competing technology called Next Generation I/O. In an unusual act of solidarity, the two groups got together, compromised on their differences, and came up with a jointly developed technology called Infiniband.

In simple terms, Infiniband is a switched I/O channel that connects processors to other processors and high-speed peripherals like … Read more