Juniper is enhancing its QFX switch line to woo high-frequency traders, partnering up with high performance computing (HPC) specialist Maxeler Technologies to beef up its boxes.

The enhanced switches are being announced today to coincide with the HPC for Wall Street conference in New York — yet another example of how important the deep-pocketed, performance-obsessed financial sector is to switch vendors. Arista got its start by catering to high-speed traders, and Cisco followed suit with the Nexus 3000 line of switches.

Juniper's new QFX5100-AA is a fixed-format, 40-Gb/s switch for application acceleration. It comes with an acceleration module, the QFX-PFA, which is based on an Altera Stratix V FPGA. The PFA module isn't built as a rack-mounted switch; it's a compact, squat little box, as you can see in this Juniper blog entry.

Maxeler sells single-rack-unit HPC hardware, targeting vertical sectors such as financial services or the oil industry. In the partnership with Juniper, Maxeler will contribute algorithms for the QFX — the goal being the screamingly fast speeds that traders crave.

Both of the new Juniper QFX products are due to be available in the third quarter.