An integral member of the SilverStorm family of virtual I/O and clustering offerings, the SilverStorm Host Channel Adapter (HCA) 9000 PCIe is a dual port 4X InfiniBand HCA utilizing an 8X PCI Express interface to enable higher server bandwidth than is possible with PCI-X. It offers an aggregate of 20 Gb/sec of full duplex bandwidth. PCI Express offers up to four times peak bandwidth improvement over PCI-X slots coupled with lower latencies. The increased bandwidth and lower latency are critical attributes for High Performance Business Computing (HPBC) and storage applications. RDMA protocol support provides InfiniBand with added advantages. The SilverStorm HCA 9000 PCIe creates an expressway of balanced bandwidth between the server and the InfiniBand fabric, allowing information transfer at 20Gb/s, up to 16 times the bandwidth of GbE and 8 times Myrinet - with up to 90% reduction in internal latency. A comprehensive host environment of high-performance Upper Level Protocols (ULPs) contained within the QuickSilver software family, including QuickSilver VirtualNIC, QuickSilver VirtualHBA, MPI, IBoIP, SDP, and uDAPL, enables the SilverStorm HCA 9000 to supercharge High Performance Business Computing (HPBC) applications such as modeling and simulation, clustered databases, and embedded clustering applications. Like all offerings from SilverStorm Technologies, the SilverStorm ULPs seamlessly integrate with existing server environments requiring no changes to the operating system or application code.