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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.
> 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:
So basically 4 TB / node. Is each node have independent memory or not?
I'll have to allocate an entire 1.6 TB drive for swap space.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Then it's dead already. Unless it comes with some kind of magical recompiler.
160 TB...
32000 seconds or just under 9 hours at 40Gb/s assuming you have a storage array that can saturate that link.
I would wager to guess that each node lives in some subregion of the memory address. And that each OS instance (or one giant distributed OS) accesses all addresses uniformly.
It's certainly not infeasible even without memristor tech. But I wonder what benefits it has. The whole point of having localized nodes is to take advantage of the travel latency. Unless this is optimized specifically for embarrassingly parallel data feed-forward tasks, which even modern GPU workloads aren't anymore.
Huh? You mean it not a von Neumann or Harvard architecture because the article doesn't lead me to _that_ conclusion:
I think what HP means is that you no more have to compress/pack your database tuples into 4K-sized pages because they "just stay in memory". The same for other formerly-disk-based structures like B-trees and such. Also, changes in latencies on their own might change algorithm preferences massively.
Ezekiel 23:20
Finally, enough RAM for Firefox!!
Because good doesn't actually need "250,000 times more storage space than the entire digital universe today." Evil, though, would love to have it so that every single thing you do online can be permanently recorded on your profile for use as a cudgel by the government should you step out of line, and as a monetization tool by big business should you remain in check.
160 TB of RAM ought to be enough for anybody
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.
It's almost enough to store all the data their keylogger stole.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hey, it sure as hell worked for Pink Floyd.
4096 yottabytes = 4.096e27 bytes; 2^n=4.096e27, solve for n ... n = 92. Now we know the market for these 128-bit processors!
I don't recall them announcing this the last time this concept was in the news, but if they're doing that, then yes, that's an even bigger change. (I admit I'm still sort of fond of the Connection Machine...)
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Track and analyze your life to the smallest fraction we will. Soon. sooooooooon. MMHEHEHEHE!
Wrong!
The correct question is: "does it run Crysis?"
The article contradicts itself multiple times.
First, the start of the article (and the summary) say it's a prototype computer with a single bank of memory. Later they report that the machine has the 160TB spread across 40 nodes. It might be logically contiguous but it's hardly a "single bank".
Secondly, the start of the article describes the architecture as memory-centric, but HP later states: "the Machine is an attempt to build, in essence, a new kind of computer architecture that integrates processors and memory seamlessly using a flexible interconnect scheme"
Wat?
Having huge banks of memory and passing them through a "single computer" bottleneck is a colossal waste.
Actually the first question should be would this be enough to hold all the Internet's porn?
But it still comes short of what Chrome needs.
If it is anything like the HPs I have owned, some major part will go out in 2 to 3 years.
Memory integrated architectures (PRISM, MPA, etc, etc..) have long been a twinkle in our collective eye, but I doubt HPE has the critical mass to pull this one across the finish line. Gone are the days when HP Labs held any credible sway in architecture. When was the last time HP(no E) told us they knew best in things architectural? Remember the Itanic!
Addressing 160 TB just requires a 48 bits bus, which most recent 64 bits architectures have. So "simultaneously" is probably missing from the title..
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Being able to do an operation on an entire huge dataset in memory instead of a pile of fetching and carrying to do it on disk.
Since the alternative is an order of magnitude (or several) slower a bit of latency isn't a terrible price to pay.
You are being watched...
#DeleteChrome
My question is different. Which CPU does it use? Xeon? Or does HP try to leverage what's left of the Itanium? And if it's Itanium, I doubt it'll be Linux: HP/UX would be the only game in town. Linux abandoned it long ago, and even FreeBSD didn't port their LLVM/Clang compiler to this platform.
This page:
https://news.hpe.com/memory-driven-computing-explained/
has more helpful information about how the architecture works. It's neat.
Who cares what it runs, the NSA has already ordered a dozen of them.
In unrelated news, you may want to switch to a minimum password length of 32 characters for any account you care about. Just saying...
This is the same HP that hasn't come up with a hit since the bubble jet printer, people. The same HP that pushed a cloud computing solution that was so pig-fucking awful that The Onion mocked them about it. I worked at HP at the time, and I really have to think that The Onion had someone on the inside...because their parody was unbelievably on target. "We have 4G, 5G, 6G...we have all the Gs. We have app." That's literally as bad as what some of the people at HP were about it...it defied belief. This is the same HP that came up with a small microchip that could hold information and push it to your phone...but alas, as good as it sounded to have them talk about it, the phone's receiver had to stay within an inch of the thing, and the data transfer rate was literally as bad as a modem from the late 80s. This is the same HP that couldn't come within billions of dollars of precision as they tried to evaluate the price of another company they bought...and then effectively sued themselves when they realized that they fucked up on the offer they'd made, had accepted, and consummated. HP had to state on their SEC filings that flight of talented people had become a major impediment to their achieving their business goals...starting several years ago. And it hasn't gotten better since. These are stupid motherfucking people.
Oh, in more recent news, this is the same HP whose business-grade laptops (since we're talking HPE here, really) had a keylogger built into the audio driver.
So yeah...I doubt that this "machine" is all that. I'm curious...have they ever actually managed to CONNECT it to 160 terabytes of RAM at once, or is this a theoretical capability? Because they lie like a rug about this kind of silly detail. I can't help but notice that those 160 TB all have to be in a "single bank of memory." Wow, that must be one long-ass DIMM!
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
AI using multidimensional data sets. I work with cubes in the tens of terabytes that could be sped up thousands of times if they could be held in memory.
It is a massive NUMA thing. It uses a ridiculous number of special ARMv8 cores. RFA and all that jazz...
The critical number missing in TFA is the memory access speeds at various tiers of the NUMA.
Take a 4GHz computer. How far can a memory access go in one cycle given the speed of light? The answer is "not even to the other side of a 19 inch server rack. Not even halfway across a laptop." You can fetch cache lines in bulk, sure, but at some point this fact will intrude into your code, demanding you keep local registers local and tightly coupled calculations on physically close nodes... we can't tell how drastic a relief "The Machine" provides from such constraints without those numbers.
Also where the RAM design sits between a modern day HPCC and an ideal nonblocking multiport mesh is critical to know... and whether it automatically adapts by moving memory to more efficient banks transparently to the OS/app.
Someone had to do it.
no
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Why didn't you bother reading the second line of my post before spending so much time writing what you did? What you wrote is all true but kind of irrelevant without a massive leap in technology.
Multiple nodes is certainly not as fast as having it on one board, but try reading that second line to find out why it's still useful.
In Russia 160 Terabytes * IS * you. Yet, so true.
Should be no considering the GPU would be lacking.
Imagine what you could do with a Beowolf Cluster of these...
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
AI using multidimensional data sets. I work with cubes in the tens of terabytes that could be sped up thousands of times if they could be held in memory.
Indeed. I wonder how useful it would be for someone like the NSA or NRO for analyzing large datasets in near-realtime like, for instance, all the cellphone communications "metadata" (and contents?) in an area and cross check it against other datasets to destroy privacy, reveal networks of association of political/ideological opponents, etc etc? "Predict" crime a la 'Minority Report'?
Seems like just the kind of cutting edge mass-data analysis technology leaders of a surveillance state would soil themselves over at the thought of the possibilities for control of the population it could bring to life.
We must always be careful to remember that the atomic age brought bombs that could end humanity as well as reactors and other tech. This tech I feel has a second edge to that sword with almost equal potential for being used for evil as any weapon of war I know of. This "bomb" could possibly be a key tool in the enslavement of an entire society.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Assuming you have flash enabled...otherwise a Beowulf cluster is required.
The write speeds are awesome. Plus it's webscale because it doesn't use joins.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It might! One of the infographics on the HPE site claims the population of Earth will be 80 billion by 2020. That's gonna necessitate a whole lot of good.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Isn't this just IBMs iSeries reborn? That was / is a 64-bit address space that addresses physical memory and disk in one single-level storage. Granted, in the real world we don't often put 160TB into a machine, and the balance may be made up of spinning disks, but as far as the software is concerned it is the same, surely?
If it were AIX it would have recommended a swap space 2.5x physical memory ..
but then, that memory space being part of the universe...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Does it run Linux? That's the first question.
Only.
The second, is this like 10 years out?
Multiple vendors sell servers with 64TB RAM already, and expanding further was blocked by the lack of 5-level paging. Patches to do so have been floating on LKML for a while, thus hardware that can do that should be well past prototype stage.
On the other hand, all patches I've seen are for x86, and this is arm64, so I'm apparently missing something.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The old version of that machine (more than 10 years ago) was using 384 Itaniums with 2GB of RAM per CPU and custom SGI interconnects so that the operating system saw one single memory space an all the CPUs.
No big news here.
It looks like HP wants to take something out of the effort that was put into the whole Itanium business, now that it is being discontinued.
The new version of Cosmos uses x86 CPUs and GPUs as accelerators.
They call it simple "the machine" so that they don't have to tell you what it will be use for.
Such a system is used for MASSIVE data collection and data mining of YOU, your every purchase, every movement, every phone call, every photo text chat video etc.... ALL OF YOU.... mined and mapreduced into various priceless morsels of control they can instantiate over you, never having given you a dime for the "value" (ahem, control and your soul) they reap.
You are getting soooo FUCKED, you, your wife, your children, families and grandkids, yet you still refuse to rise up and do anything about it. Sad, so very sad and stupid you are.
lol. They already do all of that, you numpty.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Basically they took 10 PCs and put the PC boxes in another box, then labelled that box "The Machine". A box of boxes. It'll change the world!
That's your take-home from this? lol.
Stick to playing with the worms in your garden mate.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It might! One of the infographics on the HPE site claims the population of Earth will be 80 billion by 2020. That's gonna necessitate a whole lot of good.
lol. I assume they meant 8 billion. Pretty bad mistake.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Seriously, are we still using books as a unit of comparison? Why not say it can process 80% of the internet, etc.?
It's a shame there are no baseline performance statistics it would be interesting to know how much of a game changer this thing really is.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
It wasn't a mistake, it's much more ominous than that. Once The Machine will go live, all other machines that are connected in the (aptly named) Internet of Things will rise up against humanity. Afterwards, the survivors will be used as batteries to power The Machine and others of its kind. They will need approximately 80 billion humans to power the Eight Machines that make up the Council of Kobol. That is your future once this machine goes live. And they even have the gall to tell us outright.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
but, if power is interrupted (because that NEVER happens, even with UPS, right?), do you have to start over from scratch, and reinstall the OS, databases, etc?
I wonder how useful it would be for someone like the NSA or NRO for analyzing large datasets in near-realtime like, for instance, all the cellphone communications "metadata" (and contents?) in an area and cross check it against other datasets to destroy privacy, reveal networks of association of political/ideological opponents, etc etc? "Predict" crime a la 'Minority Report'?
Well, they did call it The Machine, so I assume they're trying to make it easy for the government to connect the dots on that idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Enjoy. One of the funniest things I've seen in a long time
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Yea, but how many cat pictures do you need open at the same time?
But can it run Crysis?
Bolt of insight. Mind blown. Show us the way!
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
In Soviet Russia, the largest single-memory computer uses 64KB segments.
Yea, but how many cat pictures do you need open at the same time?
All of them, at once... obviously,,, You just can't have too many cat pictures...
Doubtful.
Read-ahead protocols allow you to identify further data sets and bring them in and out of memory faster than algorithmic performance. The fastest pattern is a giant linear read, and you can issue a DMA to read in the next several hundred megabytes and expire the prior without the CPU being further involved.
Algorithms that process more-complex data sets generally need instrumentation code to identify where the next addresses are, which can be ordered to occur before processing: instead of identify an array of 300, process it, then read off the next address and move your attention there, you would identify the array of 300, skip it, read the next address, issue the read-ahead, and process. This ordering only really adds the call for read-ahead (an OS madvise() call, really) on top of all other work.
For sufficiently-small data sets, issuing readaheads at every junction is brutal. For large datasets, scattering across RAM would incur an incredible amount of lag due to long RAS/CAS cycles, and CPU prefetch calls are required for performance. A "large data set" is one that your CPU is not sufficiently fast enough to process in a small time.
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This will do more to enable true AI than all the neural networks of the last 5 years'.
That would make an awesome movie. Just the one, though.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They cut a turd in two. Now there's two turds!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
My question is how many floppies do "4,096 yottabytes" take?
What a nightmare. Imagine how long memtest would take to run to identify just ONE goddamn back memory stick! What are you thinking, HP?
I asked the technical lead Kirk Bresniker (chief architect at Hewlett Packard Labs) about this exact thing at the launch yesterday, and he said no, that you should be able to use conventional software (I specifically asked about Python), with the speed-up occuring under the hood.
I am not entirely convinced that it will be that easy...
1 yottabyte = 2^80 or 10^24
4096/1.44 = 2,844.4444
So, basically 2,844,444,444,444,000,000,000,000,000 floppies.
The weight of one floppy is 19g, in case anyone wants to do the conversion to VW Beetles.
I will. Right after I have made clear that I, for one, welcome our new Machine overlord!
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Guess I need to buy another box
I didn't see any images of the machine. But my first thought was, "16 Petabytes would stop old men eating their soup." My next thought was, "Finally, a machine that could handle a chat bot." So, how much HP?
Read-ahead protocols allow you to identify further data sets and bring them in and out of memory faster than algorithmic performance. The fastest pattern is a giant linear read, and you can issue a DMA to read in the next several hundred megabytes and expire the prior without the CPU being further involved.
Yes, because it hides the fact that the smallest block you can fetch is hundreds of bytes in size at least, and possibly several kilobytes.
Algorithms that process more-complex data sets generally need instrumentation code to identify where the next addresses are, which can be ordered to occur before processing: instead of identify an array of 300, process it, then read off the next address and move your attention there, you would identify the array of 300, skip it, read the next address, issue the read-ahead, and process. This ordering only really adds the call for read-ahead (an OS madvise() call, really) on top of all other work.
And how does that help you with data structures in which the access sequence is data-dependent even over smaller pieces of data? Spatial trees, for example? Unless of course you're tacitly limiting yourself to all the others that aren't. And madvise, isn't that for memory-mapped files on block devices? Since I don't see how madvise could tweak CPU cache logic which is apparently hard-coded. Somehow I can't shed the feeling that you're reasoning circularly, i.e., that we're doing things like this mostly because we were given the tools for them that were provided for us to do these things because that's all we could back then.
Ezekiel 23:20
Didn't Crays use something like this where the memory was central to the operating structure of the computer? Can anyone enlighten me?
And how does that help you with data structures in which the access sequence is data-dependent even over smaller pieces of data?
Generally, if you're scattering over different row selects in RAM, you stall the CPU about 200 FSB cycles or 2,000 cycles for a 10x multiplier when you jump around in RAM. That means if the data is all in RAM to begin with and you spend 20 cycles processing, then jump to some data 40 megabytes away, you spend roughly 99.0099% of your time stalled waiting for CPU cache miss. To get around this, you'd have to use CPU prefetch instructions to load the upcoming data into L1.
Access structures as such tend to be packed to consider CPU cache for that reason--see Judy Trees--and, as such, you'd be fetching blocks of at least 4K if not stuff packed localized to 4M (huge pages) to take advantage of the required packing.
In other words: structures that aren't decently optimizable by reading the data in from disk ahead of time are hella slow even if in RAM.
Since I don't see how madvise could tweak CPU cache logic which is apparently hard-coded
madvise() lets you mmap() 128TiB of disk-backed data (files) and then tell the kernel that span A is no longer needed (so discard it from memory) and span B will be needed very soon (so read it into RAM now instead of waiting for the upcoming read() call). You'll need a separate CPU-level prefetch instruction after that read due to cache flushing on the context switch, except on modern architectures which can context switch to supervisor and back without a thread switch and not flush all user-context cache.
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In Soviet Russia, the largest single-memory computer uses 64KGB segments.
FTFY