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InfiniBand is a new device interconnect technology that was developed by the IBTA (InfiniBand Trade Association) in association with Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and other industry leaders. The architecture is a switched fabric with a packet-switching communication protocol. It also specifies links, host channel adapters, and adapter form factors.

InfiniBand evolved from previous work with I/O architectures called Future I/O and NGIO (Next-Generation I/O). These two were combined into System I/O and then redefined again into InfiniBand. The architecture was designed with multivendor interoperability in mind. It draws on the success of previous switched fabric architectures such as Fibre Channel.