Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) says it has successfully demonstrated memory-driven computing, which promises significant performance and efficiency gains.
The Machine is HPE's vision for the future of computing.
The idea behind the project is to combine memory-driven computing, photonics and a new fabric that together can deal with massive amounts of data.
The project has been running for five years already, and its roots go back even further.
{loadposition stephen08}"We have achieved a major milestone with The Machine research project, one of the largest and most complex research projects in our company's history," said HPE enterprise group executive vice-president and general manager Antonio Neri.
"With this prototype, we have demonstrated the potential of memory-driven computing and also opened the door to immediate innovation. Our customers and the industry as a whole can expect to benefit from these advancements as we continue our pursuit of game-changing technologies."
The proof-of-concept prototype demonstrates compute nodes accessing a shared pool of fabric-attached memory, an optimised Linux-based operating system running on a customised system on a chip, photonics/optical communication links, and new software programming tools designed to take advantage of abundant persistent memory.
HPE said the new tools have shown improved execution speeds of up to 8,000 times on a variety of workloads on existing products, and that it expects to achieve similar results as it expands the capacity of the prototype The Machine with more nodes and memory.
While the company plans to increase its focus on exascale computing, it said the memory-driven computing architecture is just as applicable to IoT devices.
HPE said it is committed to rapidly commercialising the non-volatile memory (NVM), fabric (including photonics), ecosystem enablement and security technologies developed for The Machine.
It suggested that true, byte-addressable NVM will be introduced as soon as 2018/2019; Synergy systems coming in 2017 will accept future photonics/optics technologies, with photonics coming to additional product lines as soon as 2018/2019. While no timeframe was mentioned, the company also plans to bring to market fabric-attached memory.
On the software side, HPE is collaborating with Hortonworks/Spark, releasing code packages on Github, and is participating in the Gen-Z Consortium (which is working to produce an open systems Interconnect designed to provide memory semantic access to data and devices via direct-attached, switched or fabric topologies).
HPE's prototype The Machine includes new, secure memory interconnects as part of the company's goal of embedding security throughout the entire hardware and software stack. Further work in this broad area will be undertaken in the coming years.