HIPPI became an official ANSI standard in 1990 and is used primarily to connect supercomputers and to provide high-speed backbones for local-area networks (LANs).
Short for High Performance Parallel Interface, a standard technology for physically connecting devices at short distances and high speeds. The basic flavor of HIPPI transfers 32 bits in parallel for a data transfer speed of 0.8 Gbps. Wide HIPPI transfers 64 bits at a time to yield 1.6 Gbps. New HIPPI standards supporting rates of 6.4 Gbps are under development.
