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.
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).
