HIPPI: What is it, where did it come from, and where is it going?

The first commercial High-Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI) equipment was delivered in 1988, and HIPPI is the current interface of choice for supercomputers and other high end equipment. HIPPI currently supports data rates of 800 and 1600 Mbit/s. The evolution of HIPPI will be described, including some of the design choices made, describing where the author feels each came from, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. The HIPPI standards committee is now working on a new physical layer interface supporting data transfer rates of 6. 4 Gbit/s, an increase of eight times the current common HIPPI rate. The design objectives will be discussed, and the new interface will be described