Quadrics was a supercomputer company formed in 1996 as a joint venture between Alenia Spazio and the technical team from Meiko Scientific.

[2] The Quadrics name was first used in 1993 for a commercialized version of the APE100 SIMD parallel computer produced by Alenia Spazio and originally developed by INFN, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics.

Their first design was the Elan2 network ASIC, intended for use with the UltraSPARC CPU, attached to it using the Ultra Port Architecture (UPA) system bus.

By the time of its release Elan3 had been re-aimed at the Alpha/PCI market instead, after Quadrics had formed a relationship with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

The combination of Quadrics and Alpha 21264 (EV6) microprocessors proved very successful, and Digital/Compaq rapidly became one of the world's largest suppliers of supercomputers.

Another high-profile Quadrics system was the fastest[3] Linux cluster in the world called Thunder[4] installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2003/2004.

Thunder consisted of 1024 Intel Tiger Quad Itanium II Processor servers to deliver 19.94 teraflops on parallel Linpack.

Each of these computing nodes will contain multiple Quadrics QsNetII (Elan4) network adapters to deliver over 60 teraflops (sixty thousands billions of operations per second).

Many of Quadrics' technical staff have since found similar employment in developing HPC networking products with Gnodal, one of the many fabless semiconductor companies based in Bristol in the UK.

Although it can be used with TCP/IP; like SCI, Myrinet and InfiniBand it is usually used with a communication API such as Message Passing Interface (MPI) or SHMEM called from a parallel program.

QsNetII is designed for use within SMP systems — multiple, concurrent processes can utilise the network interface without any task switching overhead.

Late in 2007, the Quadrics management decided to cancel the QsTenG Ethernet developments and concentrate efforts on the QsNet product line.

This caused a group employees to leave and help found Gnodal, to develop large scalable Ethernet systems.