HP haters: Get ready to rage against THE MACHINE 'next year'

Zeta will solve all our energy problems by 1970 and we'll be living on Mars by 1999.

is this not glorified ssd? It's all well and good having your storage as the base for your data but it still needs processing be that with GPU or a CPU before it's put in memory or while it's in memory performing tasks.

Also would it not be better to further integrate the controllers to increase speed rather than messing about changing the architecture?

If my comments are that of an idiot then if someone could please explain I would be appreciative.

Thanks.

The real bombshell

>HP is now exploring alternative non-volatile memory technologies for the Machine

Wow considering I assumed this project was serving somewhat as a PoC for memristor technology in general that 2018 available date (was originally 2014) is looking very optimistic now. Its Itanium all over again except it may never come to market.

IBM POWER8 has this today

After reading the article and the comments I'm dumbstruck by HP. They failed with Itanium, failed with the cloud, in software, shed their instrument business years ago and now splitting into two companies all while developing a brand new server, compute and memory technology running a new OS - on their own! Why for God's sake?

IBM's POWER8 servers using the CAPI http://www-304.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/capi/home.html interface attached to their FlashSystem 840 storage takes a 48 TB 2U Flash array and after using RAID with a Hot Spare they create a 40 TB RAID protect memory extender from the servers base 2 TB. Fast and resilient in 2015. The solution is called IBM Data Engine for NoSQL based on the Redis Labs NoSQL product. http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/solutions/bigdata-analytics/data-engine-nosql/

That's a fail. They are stalling. Obviously the engineering samples from their silicon foundry have not turned out as planned. No Memristor memory, just DRAM now. Then it is not anything that other people aren't doing. You can buy a very nice 32 Tbyte (DRAM) server from Oracle for only one million dollars. That's not much of a markup in that segment. If you want to do memory based AI research it is a bargain.

How will that work....

... with normal operating systems? Are they trying to re-invent that, too? If they do, kudos to them, but I doubt they will make it as only a small fraction of designs for "operating systems" are actually successful.

Rebooting the CPU?

Sounds really exciting. Computation has been basically the same since it got going so seeing a fundamentally new architecture is encouraging. The kludge between local storage and RAM was always effectively a cost and technology workaround anyway.

That said, what does "rebooting a CPU" even mean? Is that just clearing the registers and starting a new stack, or am I missing something?

Obligatory Person of Interest Comment

According to documentary I saw recently, the Machine has already been built by a reclusive billionaire with a limp.

HP's new moonshot is.... a SERVER! Really going for it with the old moonshots, there...

I'll stick with volatile memory for now

Sometimes you just have to suck it up, pull the plug and start over as the only way to get back to a usable system. I don't know if I want a system that will try to go back to whatever shit state it was in before the power cycle.

The secure from the ground up and ludicrous data transfer speeds sound much more promising.

Not server++

Maybe I'm optimistic, but those posters complaining on the grounds that this won't run their web service any faster (if at all, with it's new OS) have missed the point.

In the data crunching corner of the world, most of the innovation is around describing 'non traditional' processing tasks and then mapping those (very painfully) on to traditional hardware. Everyone will tell you that adding another off the shelf node to a compute cluster is cheap and you can expand to build a cluster capable of handling the large loads that big data, inference and graph compute problems throw up. The problem is that big clusters do not scale linearly when it comes to reliability, and network and disk effects mean that at least half of a cluster's energy goes into overcoming the dead weight of having compute resources that don't match the task. We don't actually want a vaster, more manageable cluster of Linux boxes, we want a compute resource matched to the process description.

Soooo.. as Mars shots go, this could make some sense. We're starting to describe processing in terms of directed graphs of actions, which can be mapped to both batch and real time work loads. An architecture that starts with the premise of many actors consuming a vast store of messages in a robust and scalable way would potentially outperform today's clusters by orders of magnitude. Given the cost of provisioning and maintaining a modern cluster, the exotic nature of the Machine may be a small price to pay.

I'm reminded of the early introduction of NUMA machines, which suddenly introduced capabilities that allowed tasks that used to be done by a building full of mainframes to be done by a box that sat under your desk. This architecture could potentially do the same to clusters - and not by virtualising thousands of machines into one box.

Makes sense to me

But doesn't there still have to be hierarchies?

It would be wasteful for the memory to be homogenous in terms of speed. Access for graphics purposes has to be faster than for storage purposes, so you're still going to segregate memory for particular functions.

Also, in booting up the memory stack there needs to be a priority hierarchy there, otherwise you will end up waiting ten minutes for the entire stack to warm up when just a subset will be adequate for the target bootstrap process. I appreciate though that once it's booted up it's never taken off-line.