HP Enterprise Unveils a Futuristic Computer

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is inviting the open source community to collaborate on their ambitious project known as The Machine. Back in 2014, HP introduced the concept of The Machine, which places memory instead of the processor at the core of the computer.

According to HP, “Imagine a computer with hundreds of petabytes of fast memory that remembers everything about your history, helps inform real time situational decisions, and enables you to predict, prevent, and respond to whatever the future brings.”

The Machine is based on a new concept that HP calls “Memory-Driven Computing.” Memory-driven computing collapses the memory and storage into one vast pool of memory called “universal memory.”

Bdale Garbee, veteran Linux developer and HP Fellow, said in an interview that Linux is the primary operating system HP is targeting with The Machine. Teams at HPE are working very closely with the Linux kernel community.

Garbee said that this is the first time a major company has taken a project at such an early stage to the open source community. HPE has released four tools to help the open source community in getting involved with The Machine: Fast optimistic engine for data unification services, 2) fault-tolerant programming model for non-volatile memory, 3) Fabric Attached Memory Emulation, and 4) performance emulation for non-volatile memory bandwidth.

HPE says these tools enable existing communities to capitalize on memory-driven computing in ways that could lead to breakthroughs in machine learning, graph analytics, and event processing.

HPE plans to release their internal research work on The Machine to the open source community.