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HPE Unveils The Machine, a Single-Memory Computer Capable of Addressing 160 Terabytes (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced what it is calling a big breakthrough -- creating a prototype of a computer with a single bank of memory that can process enormous amounts of information. The computer, known as The Machine, is a custom-built device made for the era of big data. HPE said it has created the world's largest single-memory computer. The R&D program is the largest in the history of HPE, the former enterprise division of HP that split apart from the consumer-focused division. If the project works, it could be transformative for society. But it is no small effort, as it could require a whole new kind of software. The prototype unveiled today contains 160 terabytes (TB) of memory, capable of simultaneously working with the data held in every book in the Library of Congress five times over -- or approximately 160 million books. It has never been possible to hold and manipulate whole data sets of this size in a single-memory system, and this is just a glimpse of the immense potential of Memory-Driven Computing, HPE said. Based on the current prototype, HPE expects the architecture could easily scale to an exabyte-scale single-memory system and, beyond that, to a nearly limitless pool of memory -- 4,096 yottabytes. For context, that is 250,000 times the entire digital universe today.
Seriously, are we still using books as a unit of comparison? Why not say it can process 80% of the internet, etc.?
Yes, and there are two related reasons. First, the LoC is a very large amount of data. It's not the kind of data that can land on a USB stick, it's enough to actually prove something.
Second, it's a known quantity of data. Even if it's approximate, it's a set amount of books, with a set amount of pages. Can we really count the amount of data on the internet? Let's establish a baseline - what constitutes "the internet" in terms of storage? Every website ever? What about apps and the data they create - do we include those databases because mobile apps use them? How many companies will volunteer how big those databases are? GoDaddy will probably be able to more-or-less say how much data they host, but how much of it is active data - does it have to be served up to count? Similarly, does this include Dropbox data that's technically accessible, but only to its end user? If so, what about end users who own their own Synology boxes and back up their pictures to it over the internet? Does the data on those home NAS units count? Do we limit protocols to HTTP, or are we also talking about FTP sites, NNTP servers (do we count the total amount of Usenet data, or does each company who peers that data count separately?), and data available via torrents? What about e-mail - does e-mail count if it's stored on a server and accessible via a web browser? What if it's only accessible via POP/IMAP?
Even if *you* came up with a number that includes what you deem appropriate for '80% of the internet', it's not going to translate well. If your metric was "anything that is accessible from a computer and isn't behind a login prompt", that's going to be different than someone who says that Dropbox counts, which doesn't fit your criteria - undoubtedly petabytes of difference, making the measurement irrelevant.