Historically there have been almost as many System Area Network (SAN) designs as there are parallel computing researchers.
However, as markets mature, standards evolve. The personal computing industry is working towards a low-level, OS bypass API
for leveraging arbitrary SANs from Windows NT. This new API is called the “Virtual Inter- face Architecture”. VI is protocol
independent. Extracting optimal performance from VI requires special hardware support at the network interface chip (NIC)
level.