7/10/2007 -- You know Cisco Systems Inc. is tops in the enterprise switching business, but did you know that Cisco is also a significant player in the high-performance technical computing (HPTC) -- or "supercomputing" -- switching segment?

That's according to Cisco, anyway, which recently tooted its supercomputing horn. One reason Cisco is so high on supercomputing is because it has invested heavily in InfiniBand, a next-generation I/O architecture designed for high-end servers. InfiniBand is the interconnect of choice in the HPTC segment, too, and Cisco -- thanks to its acquisition of the former Topspin Networks -- is one of InfiniBand's most visible champions.

Late last month, Cisco announced that its InfiniBand technology is used in six of the top 10 InfiniBand interconnected clusters on the Supercomputing Top 500 list. Cisco specifically highlighted an InfiniBand installation at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which has chosen Cisco SFS 7000 series InfiniBand products for building a 90-teraflop compute fabric consisting of more than 1,200 interconnected x86 servers. Cisco also touted other high-end success stories, such as the largest supercomputer in Scandinavia (at Statoil, in Stavanger, Norway) and a bioinformatics cluster at Stanford University dubbed Bio-X.

Analysts are intrigued by Cisco's InfiniBand gambit, which they say takes the company far from its traditional role (as a provider of network infrastructure plumbing). In this respect, InfiniBand could open up new opportunities for Cisco, industry watchers point out.

"Maybe InfiniBand will end up displacing Ethernet and Fibre Channel for certain types of tasks. Or maybe not. In either case, Cisco will have a compelling product to offer," wrote Gordon Haff, a senior analyst with consultancy Illuminata, just after Cisco's Topspin acquistion. "Cisco is maturing and moving up the stack. Sure, it still sells the underlying network plumbing and makes numerous and regular bets on what types and sizes of switches customers will buy. But its focus is increasingly on its core franchise as the enterprise interconnect of choice."

Although InfiniBand was once dismissed as an also-ran technology, it's been surprisingly resilient. Earlier this year, for example, market watcher International Data Corp. (IDC) predicted that the infrastructure challenges posed by ever-expanding server and storage workloads will encourage IT executives to take a second look at InfiniBand and other technologies. This trend, along with parallel demands in HPTC, scale-out database environments and shared virtualized I/O will cause InfiniBand host channel adaptor (HCA) revenues to nearly quadruple, surging from $62.3 million in 2006 to $224.7 million by 2011, IDC projected.

What's more, IDC also confirmed that InfiniBand continues to gain share in Top 500 Supercomputer implementations, which are usually (but not exclusively) associated with HPTC. Not only is InfiniBand becoming a preferred interconnect for HPTC, but its adoption is coming at the expense of more widely used solutions, IDC indicated. --Stephen Swoyer