Intel has agreed to buy QLogic’s InfiniBand product lines and several other assets related to its InfiniBand business, the companies announced Monday. QLogic, a provider of networking technologies, said the agreed-upon purchase price was US$125m in cash.

Intel said it made the move to enhance its networking portfolio and to provide scalable high-performance computing (HPC) fabric technology. The acquisition falls well within the company’s long-term goal of achieving ExaFLOP/s performance by 2018 – one-hundred times more compute power than today’s fastest supercomputers.

Kirk Skaugen, VP and general manager of Intel’s Data Center and Connected Systems Group, said the company had a goal of breaking the Exascale barrier by 2018.

“The technology and expertise from QLogic provide important assets to provide the scalable system fabric needed to execute on this vision,” he said.

Skaugen added that QLogic’s assets would also be beneficial for the company’s data center business. “Adding QLogic’s InfiniBand product line to our networking portfolio will bring increased options and exceptional value to our data center customers,” he said.

Last week Intel announced that Skaugen would be leaving his position at the helm of the company’s data center group, moving on to become the head of its PC business. Intel CIO Diane Bryant will take over his responsibilities as the data center group’s general manager.

QLogic provides network adapters, switches, routers and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).

Its president and CEO Simon Biddiscombe explained the sale of the company’s InfiniBand assets as an attempt to better focus on growth opportunities in converged networking, enterprise Ethernet and storage area networking products for data centers.

“In addition, the sale of these assets to a leading technology innovator and recognized HPC leader will provide a greater investment stream in high performance fabrics for InfiniBand partners and customers,” he added.