InfiniBand
Beginner
A kind of network built for supercomputers. Its switches never throw data away.
Novice
A networking standard designed for high-performance computing with RDMA built in. Switches only send data when the next hop has room for it (credit-based flow control), so packets are not dropped when the network is busy.
Expert
An end-to-end architecture from the InfiniBand Trade Association: RDMA transport over a lossless, in-order link layer with per-virtual-lane credits, centrally computed forwarding tables from a subnet manager, and features such as adaptive routing and in-network reduction in recent switches.
Explained in Scale-out networking (Systems).
See also: RDMA, Credit-based flow control.