Clustered applications running on multiple machines communicating via an Ethernet-based network often suffer from the delays that occur when data needs to be exchanged between processes running on different machines. These delays caused by the communication time make processes wait for data when they otherwise could perform useful work. Dolphin Express is a combination of a high-performance interconnect hardware to replace the Ethernet network together with a highly optimized software stack.

Two different hardware product lines are offered for Dolphin Express: Dolphin Express D (SCI) and Dolphin Express DX. Dolphin D is an interconnect which requires no dedicated switch and can thus scale linearly from 2 nodes up. The Dolphin DX interconnect requires a dedicated switch when used with more than 2 nodes. Both interconnect variants can be used in the same way as the software stack for them differs only in the lowest layer.

One part of this software stack is SuperSockets which implement a bypass of the TCP/UDP/IP protocol stack for standard socket-based inter-process communication. This bypass moves data directly via the high-performance interconnect and thereby reduces the minimal latency typically by a factor of 10 and more with 100% binary application compatibility. Using this combined software/hardware approach with MySQL Cluster, throughput improvements for the TPC-C like DBT2 benchmark of 300% and more have been measured already on small clusters. For larger clusters, this advantage continues to increase as the communication fraction of the processing time will increase.