Mellanox (acquired by Nvidia) manufactures InfiniBand host bus adapters and network switches, which are used by large computer system and database vendors in their product lines.

[2] As a computer cluster interconnect, IB competes with Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and Intel Omni-Path.

At the time it was thought some of the more powerful computers were approaching the interconnect bottleneck of the PCI bus, in spite of upgrades like PCI-X.

Initially the IBTA vision for IB was simultaneously a replacement for PCI in I/O, Ethernet in the machine room, cluster interconnect and Fibre Channel.

Mellanox had been founded in 1999 to develop NGIO technology, but by 2001 shipped an InfiniBand product line called InfiniBridge at 10 Gbit/second speeds.

[8] In 2003, the System X supercomputer built at Virginia Tech used InfiniBand in what was estimated to be the third largest computer in the world at the time.

[12] Cisco, desiring to keep technology superior to Ethernet off the market, adopted a "buy to kill" strategy.

[13] [citation needed] Of the top 500 supercomputers in 2009, Gigabit Ethernet was the internal interconnect technology in 259 installations, compared with 181 using InfiniBand.

[15] At the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference, links running at about 56 gigabits per second (known as FDR, see below), were announced and demonstrated by connecting booths in the trade show.

[17] By 2014, InfiniBand was the most popular internal connection technology for supercomputers, although within two years, 10 Gigabit Ethernet started displacing it.

A message can be: In addition to a board form factor connection, it can use both active and passive copper (up to 10 meters) and optical fiber cable (up to 10 km).

The de facto standard software is developed by OpenFabrics Alliance and called the Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED).