[drewg123]

A lot of IB technology is based on precursors like Myrinet, Quadrics, etc. Those companies were driven from the HPC market and the top500 by Mellanox in the last 15 years. It is arguable that IB won simply because it had better marketing, and a lot more venture capitol behind it.

At one point, 6 of the top 10 supercomputers in the top 500 were interconnected with Quadrics, and over 1/3 with Myrinet. However, both Quadrics and Myricom are both long gone. And neither of them sold for anything close to $6.9B

[nerpderp82]

IB has been doubling in bandwidth with every release, 10,20,50,100 and now 200G. Those other interconnect technologies did not do that.

[drewg123]

Honestly, they competed on price & marketing at first. The handwriting was already on the wall for these companies long before IB had any real advantage on speed. We were all limited by PCIe bandwidth, after all. So no matter what the link speed is, you're not going to get more bandwidth than what PCIe can provide.

I worked for Myricom when Mellanox was starting out with IB. I recall stories from that time of customers that would try IB for something like 1/2 to 1/3 of what we charged. But they could never get it to work, and ripped it out and installed Myrinet. Sadly, this made our management smug. Mellanox eventually ate their lunch because we never responded to their marketing and pricing war.

[angry_octet]

At one point it seems Myrinet was as dominant as Mellanox is now. It was very exciting at the time to get something better than ethernet, and way cheaper than SGI. Huge resistance from the developers who were used to ethernet, which still hasn't gone away.

I don't think it was just the price or marketing (although Mellanox at least had sales people -- never heard from anyone at Myricom even after buying $$ of gear). Mellanox always seemed to be pushing the envelope, which might have been more R&D dollars. Never had problems with IB not working (CX-4 and up) but I guess the gremlins depend on scale.