In a deal underscoring the growing importance of data center networking, technical computing heavyweight NVIDIA has agreed to acquire networking specialist Mellanox for $6.9 billion deal.
The transaction has strategic implications for the data center and high performance computing (HPC) sectors, as chipmaker Intel was also rumored to be among the bidders for Mellanox, a leader in interconnect technology that ties together computing resources. Mellanox pioneered the InfiniBand interconnect technology, which along with its high-speed Ethernet products is now used in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in many leading hyperscale datacenters.
NVIDIA said the deal will position the company to optimize data-intense computing workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance and lower cost solutions for customers.
“The data center has become the most important computer in the world,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. ““The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacenters,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine. The computer no longer starts and ends at the server.”
NVIDIA’s graphics processing (GPU) technology has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the rise of specialized computing, gaining traction with workloads in supercomputing, artificial intelligence (AI) and connected cars. NVIDIA has been investing heavily in innovation in AI, which it sees as a pervasive technology trend that will bring its GPU technology into every area of the economy and society.
Focus on Interconnects
Interconnects are network components that allow compute nodes to communicate with each other. Ethernet and Infiniband have been the leading interconnect technologies in high-performance computing.
