QLogic has landed a pretty big deal, entering into a contract with the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to provide its 12000 Series switches and 7300 Series adapters for an agency’s supercomputer deployment. Known as the Tri-Laboratory Linux Capacity Cluster 2, the massive system will be deployed across s a number of the agency’s facilities.

” The clusters will be deployed over the next two years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Sandia National Laboratories, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and encompasses as many as 20,000 nodes.”

Appro is the system integrator in the contract, and provides its Xtreme-X(TM) supercomputer hardware bundled with QLogic Quad Data Rate InfiniBand. The two companies were selected out of a number of bidders by passing a “highly competitive evaluation and benchmarking process” that also tested a number of other major InfiniBand vendors that were unnamed in the release.

QLogic has already been awarded with a similar contract in recent months. Late last year, the company deployed over 4,000 nodes connected to its TrueScale Infiniband product. “In this deployment, the TrueScale architecture has proven itself to be one of the most scalable interconnects ever deployed by the DOE/NNSA.”

QLogic’s shares took a hit today by a 2 percent decline, trading at $15.23.

Last month the network connectivity solutions vendor held its quarterly earnings call. 10GbE product revenue was 20 percent. Revenue from silicon products was up a whopping 50 percent, and operations margin stood at 29.5 percent.

CFO Jean Hu took a central role in the earnings call, and was hired for the position only about a month prior to the investors gathering. Hu brought 18 years of experience in corporate development to the company.