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HP-Machine-Feature

Two and a one-half years ago, HP (now HP Enterprise after the visitor dissever) revealed a new, revolutionary computer architecture it dubbed "The Machine." This new computing platform would combine cutting-edge and still unproven technologies like memristors, silicon photonics, and truly massive amounts of addressable memory. HPE was forced to dial back some of its ambition when it proved too difficult to bring the entire projection to market place all at the aforementioned time, but it refused to give up on the idea of what it calls "Memory-Driven Computing."

Today, HPE is announcing that it has demonstrated the major components of this new type of organisation, albeit in prototype form. The Machine as currently constituted consists of:

  • Compute nodes accessing a shared puddle of Fabric-Attached Retentiveness
  • An optimized Linux-based operating system (Os) running on a customized System on a Chip (SOC)
  • Photonics/Optical communication links, including the new X1 photonics module, are online and operational
  • New software programming tools designed to take reward of arable persistent memory.

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The Machine (well, one "blade" of it, anyway). The DIMM slots are filled with NAND Flash; HPE wants to transition to lower-latency retention that competes directly with DRAM in the adjacent few years.

HPE has previously shown off some of these components, similar its X1 silicon photonics module. The X1 module is capable of transferring data at up to i.2Tbps (150GB/southward of bandwidth) over a 30-l meter distance. HPE has also demonstrated silicon photonics applied science that can motility data up to l kilometers (xxx miles) at 200Gbps. HPE's major goal with The Motorcar is to create a system in which not-volatile retentivity (NVM)serves equally a true DRAM replacement, offering at least equivalent latency with drastically reduced ability consumption and low-latency optical interconnects.

Customers volition still have the option to deploy The Machine as a conventional system merely HPE's plan is to offer huge pools of NVM that can exist shared beyond many SoCs. While the diagrams below only refer to CPUs, there's no reason this model couldn't be extended to other types of accelerators — vector processors like Intel'due south Xeon Phi or GPUs from AMD and Nvidia could at least theoretically exist paired with HPE's new architecture. The following slideshow steps through some of HPE'south design elements, and the benefits it expects to offer with The Automobile compared to traditional systems. Images can be clicked to enlarge them in a new window.

When HPE announced that it would re-purpose The Car'due south design around conventional engineering science in mid-2015, it seemed to imply that the project's groundbreaking potential had been largely buried beneath financial realities and the slow pace of technological innovation that characterizes modernistic semiconductor evolution. Today, I accept to acknowledge that this dismissal was premature. HPE may not exist planning to commercialize memristor engineering in the well-nigh term, but The Machine is more than a conventional server with a huge amount of RAM, and the visitor's piece of work on depression-latency non-volatile memory and optical interconnects could have pregnant implications for HPC and Big Information problems for years to come. The Automobile won't debut equally a unmarried system with all-new technologies but should transition to new retentivity standards equally they become bachelor. This might go far a touch less exciting on launch, simply should lay the groundwork for a long-term virtuous cycle of improved functioning and reduced power consumption, up to and including (eventually) exascale-class deployments.