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.

Comments

"The Machine" could they get any more non-descript

[UnknownSoldier]

> it could require a whole new kind of software.

Huh? You mean it not a von Neumann or Harvard architecture because the article doesn't lead me to _that_ conclusion:

The new prototype has 160 TB of shared memory spread across 40 physical nodes, interconnected using a high-performance fabric protocol. It has an optimized Linux-based operating system (OS) running on ThunderX2, Caviumâ(TM)s flagship second generation dual socket capable ARMv8-A workload optimized System on a Chip.

So basically 4 TB / node. Is each node have independent memory or not?
 

Re:"The Machine" could they get any more non-descr

[imgod2u]

It seems to imply more than just persistent memory, though. It sounds like they're distributing processors in the data-path of the connected memory. Instead of the OS determining which context to put on a CPU and fetching the necessary data from memory/disk, the context and code will be decided by what data resides in memory that is closest to the processor node.

A rather natural result of persistent, high-capacity memory for non-interactive compute tasks.