I spoke with Brad Booth, chairman of the Ethernet Alliance, at the SC 08 conference here in Austin, Texas today, and he noted that while Ethernet is entrenched in the corporate data center, it is the interconnect standard for little more than half of the Top 500 supercomputers. Other standards, such as Infiniband and proprietary cables, still hold sway over the high-performance computing set, but the Alliance hopes to change all that. To that end, Booth was happy to talk about how Ethernet is moving into HPC, storage, the home and pretty much everywhere else.

In the video below, he talks about how the emerging 803.1Qbb 802.1Qbb standard for priority-based flow control will help Ethernet win out over proprietary technologies, because it allows traffic traveling over Ethernet cables to be prioritized, rather than cut off if the network becomes too congested. It’s the difference between your brain shutting down when it gets overwhelmed with information, or valiantly trying to figure out what’s most important — something we can all relate to. For that, and updates on the timing for 40-Gigabit Ethernet and 100-Gigabit Ethernet, check out the video below.