Intel Acquires Fabric Technology InfiniBand From Qlogic For $125M

Intel is announcing an acquisition today—the company has acquired the InfiniBand business from networking and hosting company Qlogic. Intel says a significant number of the employees associated with this business are expected to accept offers to join the company. The acquisition amount was $125 million in cash.

InfiniBand is a fabric technology that provides the communications links for data flow between processors and I/O devices. The scalable technology is used to connect servers in high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

Intel saus the acquisition is designed to enhance Intel’s 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. An ExaFLOP/s is a quintillion computer operations per second, a hundred times more than today’s fastest supercomputers.

Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center and Connected System Group said of the acquisition: “The technology and expertise from Qlogic provide important assets to provide the scalable system fabric needed to execute on this vision. Adding Qlogic’s InfiniBand product line to our networking portfolio will bring increased options and exceptional value to our datacenter customers.”