QLogic, a cloud networking company that recently achieved a major benchmark with its InfiniBand product line, is powering the servers for a major project with Acer.  Currently, Acer is testing the high-end gateway systems, using Xenon processors, at University of Pisa IT Centre, making for a high profile project for QLogic to be a part of.  Acer’s been up to a great deal lately, with aims of surpassing HP in PC and notebook production next year.  Tablets are of special interest to Acer as well, and team-ups present both parties opportunities to distribute their products.

The QLogic’s involvement consists of powering Acer’s InfiniBand solutions, marking an integral part of supporting Acer’s latest project.  The Register reports,   “All the servers in the centre run Windows HPC Server 2007 R2 (HPCS) and there is a QLogic Infiniband networking infrastructure in the centre, connecting both modular and high-density blade servers.

“On top of the basis cluster node operating system, HPCS provides a cluster job scheduler, a message passing interface (MPI v2), and cluster monitoring and management facilities. As well as the Windows software, Red Hat and SuSE Linux are available.  Microsoft says HPCS can scale to thousands of cores and can be integrated with Linux-based HPC platforms.”

The Acer’s high-performance computing includes a 128 node compute cluster, running Gemini multi-node systems – which are considered to be cheaper than blade design systems. All in all, the project is supported by QLogic, which is offering a solution for modular servers and high-density blade servers.

Using HPC, Acer is proving that it is a reliable player in the industry and therefore effective measures emerged, such as their contract for supplying supercomputing facilities in Taiwan. The completion of the installation is expected for March and then it will represent one of the top 50 fastest supercomputers worldwide. Gianfranco Lanci, the CEO of Acer predicted growth for the next year’s forecast, expecting an increase to overcome HP in company revenues from notebooks and PC. Acer is also looking to the tablet market in order to keep pace with the big leagues, by planning the launch of a new tablet, running Android, during April next year.

In terms of expansion, Acer has announced a while ago the acquirement of Avaya in order to develop the converged networking switch-on-a-chip device QLogic Bullet. This move is preceded by influential interest over FCoE switching technology.

This collaboration between Acer and QLogic opens the gates for more prosperous partnerships in the future.  We’re seeing a dedicated growth movement from QLogic on this end The first step was done by making public the strategy for targeting China – the second biggest economy in the world – by focusing on OEM and QLogic branded products.  We’ve seen a couple other developments from the InfiniBand market this week, with the Voltare acquisition demonstrating some industry consolidation.