It's no surprise to see such advances at the annual supercomputing conference. For 20 years, trends in communications markets have first come to light in the supercomputing industry.

Indeed, lessons shared in supercomputers and communications have moved in both directions. The supercomputing folks learned from comms brethren the utility of open storage-area network and clustering standards like Fibre Channel and Infiniband, and they also wised up to making use of "working class" technologies like Ethernet. The datacom and telecom communities learned to upgrade the tired TCP/IP infrastructure with new concepts in shared memory, advanced switching and parallel-clustering concepts, finding those approaches as relevant for routing as they are for grids.

Now, the big three interconnect consortia are prepping new concepts for the supercomputing world, and what they learn can come back to the communications market. HTC currently is ahead of the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group's PCI Express Advanced Switching group and the Rapid I/O Trade Association. HTC worked with PathScale Inc., a startup developing interconnect chips and parallel message-passing software, to implement a chip for daughtercard interconnects. And PathScale worked with newcomer Iwill Inc. on a common motherboard for HyperTransport interconnect.

The InfiniPath interconnect chip PathScale developed is ideal for expanding the scaling of sub-4-microsecond clustering beyond traditional Infiniband or Myricom Inc. networks, said PathScale vice president of marketing Len Rosenthal. But once the Linux cluster market has been conquered, PathScale has every intention of discussing HTC-based technology with router and switch vendors.

Expect Freescale Semiconductor Inc. and other RapidIO players to follow this lead. As can be seen from the roles of PathScale and Iwill, this shared technology base not only leads to richer interconnect but also provides room for startups.

Loring Wirbel is Communications editorial director for EE Times and its network publications.