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HPE Unveils The Machine, a Single-Memory Computer Capable of Addressing 160 Terabytes (venturebeat.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the era-of-big-data dept.

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.

2 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting but, not amazing by somenickname · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It would have been a lot more interesting, and a lot more paradigm shifting, if it was 160TB of ultra-fast next-gen M.2 sticks with 0MB of traditional RAM and 0MB of traditional storage. That would be a truly unique machine to work on. If you read the article, this isn't even a single machine. It's actually 40 nodes with high speed interconnects. Basically, HP is now running Linux on their VMS clusters.

  2. Re:Remember...this is HP by MancunianMaskMan · · Score: 3, Insightful
    years ago we heard HPE (or was it still HP then) talked about betting the farm on "the machine" all full of its new memristor tech, cheap, fast, persistent, practical, egg-laying wolly milk pig kind of chips.

    Now it's "DIMMs with a little battery stuck on" to handle the "persistency". Hope that's just for the demo.