Hewlett Packard Enterprise officially introduced The Machine – the world’s largest single-memory computer.
The first prototype, which is the outcome of the largest R&D program in the history of the company, contains 160 terabytes (TB) of memory. The company said The Machine architecture could 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. The researchers calculate that a system of that size could “simultaneously work with every digital health record of every person on earth; every piece of data from Facebook; every trip of Google’s autonomous vehicles and every data set from space exploration all at the same time.”
Key specs of the new prototype builds on the achievements of The Machine research program, includin:
- 160 TB of shared memory spread across 40 physical nodes, interconnected using a high-performance fabric protocol.
- An optimized Linux-based operating system (OS) running on ThunderX2, Cavium’s flagship second generation dual socket capable ARMv8-A workload optimized System on a Chip.
- Photonics/Optical communication links, including the new X1 photonics module, are online and operational.
- Software programming tools designed to take advantage of abundant persistent memory.
“We believe Memory-Driven Computing is the solution to move the technology industry forward in a way that can enable advancements across all aspects of society,” said Mark Potter, CTO at HPE and director, Hewlett Packard Labs. “The architecture we have unveiled can be applied to every computing category—from intelligent edge devices to supercomputers.”
