IEEE Spectrum January, 2016 - 34

Top t ech

2016

Can HPE's
"The Machine"
Deliver?
A 320-terabyte prototype, expected
this year, will showcase the company's
bid to reinvent computing

H P n e v e r s H i e d away from big names for its computers. There are high-performance servers named
Apollo and optimized computing systems called
Moonshot. And then there's The Machine.
When Hewlett-Packard Co.-now split in two-
announced The Machine in Las Vegas in 2014, it presented the
project as a near-complete overhaul of traditional computer architecture. Gone were the CPU-centric architecture, the slow copper
communications, and the messy hierarchy of traditional memory.
In their place, specialized computing cores, speedy light- carrying
photonic connections, and a massive store of dense, energy-efficient
memristor memory. The resulting computer, its designers say, will
be efficient enough to manipulate petabyte-scale data sets in an
unprecedented fashion, expanding what companies and scientists
can accomplish in areas such as graph theory, predictive analytics,
and deep learning in a way that could improve our daily lives.

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There is nothing small about what HP promised. Now the question is what will come of the
initial claims. It seems we'll soon get a glimpse of
the vision, realized in hardware; Hewlett Packard
Labs (formerly HP Labs) says it hopes to unveil
its first large-scale prototype of The Machine this
year. The project is now part of Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (HPE), which focuses on corporate
computing (the second HP spin-off, HP Inc., sells
PCs and printers).
That initial computer is a whopper by modern
standards: It's expected to be about the size of a
server rack, with 320 terabytes of memory and
more than 2,500 CPU cores. But one key Machine
component will be missing: the memristor.
The device, one of four fundamental circuit elements, was developed at HP Labs. HP touted it as
an energy-efficient replacement for DRAM, the
workhorse memory that sits close to CPUs. Like
flash, memristors can also act as nonvolatile storage, retaining their data even when powered down.
HP Labs looked at ways to capitalize on these
properties after the memristor was announced
in 2008. In the end, the device became a key component of a larger overhaul the company calls
Memory-Driven Computing. Current computers
have different forms of memory, each with different advantages when it comes to cost, power consumption, and speed. Memristors with various
capabilities, the thinking went, could eventually
replace them all.
In his first public talk about The Machine, in
2014, the then HP Labs director Martin Fink
outlined a picture of what this might look like:
a computer server with as much as 160 petabytes
of data-roughly five times what the Large Hadron
Collider produces in the course of a year-all accessible in less than 250 nanoseconds. Such capacity
would be huge, says Richard Fichera, an analyst
at Forrester Research, and the access time on
the order of 1,000 times as fast as can be done
today. But memristors have had teething pains.
Although HP previously showed off wafers containing memristors, a commercial offering has
yet to emerge.
When The Machine's first prototype arrives, it
will carry energy-hungry DRAM in their place. The
memory will be a stand-in, the team says, that can
be used to emulate later hardware and move development forward. "Everything the Machine team
is doing is designed to get us to working, useful

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum January, 2016