The Machine (computer architecture)

The Machine was a computer cluster with many individual nodes connected over a memory fabric. The fabric interconnect used VCSEL-based silicon photonics with a custom chip called the X1. The fabric attached memory is not cache coherent and requires software to be aware of this property. The interconnect protocol was developed in-house and known as Next Generation Memory Interconnect (NGMI). Each node contained ARMv8-A based Broadcom/Cavium ThunderX2 SoCs. In total there were 40 32-core SoCs. Due to unavailability of adequate memristor-based NVRAM or phase-change memory, the prototype used 160 TB of battery-backed DRAM. Despite this setback, software architect Keith Packard said this "can be used to prove the other parts of the design before switching". According to The Next Platform, HPE considered switching to Intel Optane DIMMs "when production quantities of are available on the market". == Software overview ==

Two major software projects were created for the Machine. An experimental version of Linux called Linux++ with all the necessary enhancements to configure the hardware and work with traditional programming models. This included bridge configuration, access control and mapping using the DAX subsystem. In parallel, a new operating system (OS) called Carbon was announced that would be designed from first principles to take full advantage of an NVRAM based computer. Primary workloads for The Machine included in-memory database, Hadoop-style software, and real-time big data analytics. HPE claimed that a memory-driven computing design like The Machine could "improve speeds by up to 8000x compared to conventional systems". In the prototype system, the fabric attached memory of the system was organised by a "top of rack" management server component called The Librarian. The Librarian divided the memory into "shelves" of 8GB "books", and hardware protections could be configured on book boundaries. == History ==

A few years after HP’s re-discovery of the Memristor, the newly appointed CTO of HP, Martin Fink, created a HP Labs project to build a computer system based on memristor to tackle the slowing of Moore's law. He announced the project at HP’s Discover event in the summer of 2014. Some of the ideas of The Machine also came from Dragonhawk system designs. Three-quarters of HP Labs’s 200 staff were focused on the hardware and software of the machine. In 2015, Hewlett-Packard separated into two separate companies, HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), with The Machine project assigned to the latter. In late 2016, Martin Fink retired as HPE CTO. Fink's retirement announcement also said that Hewlett Packard Labs staff would be moved into the Enterprise product group to "align our R&D work on The Machine with the business". By early 2017, Hewlett Packard Labs had a slide saying that the project's aim was “to demonstrate progress, not develop products” and they would “collaborate to deliver differentiating Machine value into existing architectures as well as disruptive architectures”. BleepingComputer said "In other words, The Machine is no longer a product in its own right. Instead it will provide technologies that will be used in other HPE products going forward.". HPE restructured its pure R&D organization and placed it in the products group. Yahoo! Finance reported that the Machine prototype "remains years away from being commercially available". In 2018, HPE stated that the project had reached the stage where it needed commercial applications from customers in the next step of its evolution. == References ==