This write-up first appeared in our other vertical, Digital World Native.
By: Anand. R
Here’s a number – According to one estimate, HP’s latest invention, The Machine, will be able to calculate 640 TBs of data in 1 billionth of a second. You may close your mouth now; this jaw-dropping reckoning is all set to come true.
At the recent HP Discover in Las Vegas, USA, naturally the buzz was around The Machine – a program at HP Labs whose rather dramatic name matches the grandiose plans HP has. The Machine aims to become the computing & digital memory storage technology & architecture that will be used to handle the ever-expanding needs of the data flowing across global networks & being piled into data centers that are already incredibly huge.
It’s hard to overstate the problem of providing computing infrastructure that can handle Big Data or data from devices that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT). The biggest unit you may have heard about is a TeraByte (TB), which can hold about 100,000 minutes of music. Now, they’re already talking about ZettaBytes, which can hold over two billion years of music. By the end of this decade, we’ll have to move on to the BrontoByte, which can hold two quadrillion years of music.
The amount of resources (data center hardware, electricity, etc.) that will have to be spent to provide computing resources on such scales makes things…well, a little complicated to implement. The only way to do it then would be to introduce a completely new computing architecture & technology that can handle huge amounts of data far more easily at exponentially higher speeds. That’s where The Machine comes into the picture.
To state that HP is making a big play here would be an understatement, throwing all its research & development resources at this moonshot project. So why the name, The Machine? In the company’s own words: When we first started developing it, we wanted to be very careful not to call it a server, workstation, PC, device or phone, because it actually encompasses all of those things. So as we were waiting for Marketing to come up with a cool code name for the project, we started calling it The Machine—and the name stuck.
Now for some scientific mumbo jumbo: The core concept is that HP’s long-delayed memristors project will be combined with photonics to provide high-speed electricity-free data transfer & storage using photons instead of electrons as the medium. HP’s memristors will theoretically flip between 0 & 1 at high speeds in the pico-second range. Memory modules comprising memristors will be connected to processors using photonic cables, enabling data transfer at speeds of up to 6 TB per second.
That sounds fantastic, except for the tiny little fact that HP doesn’t have the processors or operating system platform to handle this kind of technology.
That is what they are working on now. HP is working on replacing your run-of-the-mill computing processor with special purpose chips that are as good as a full system, completely integrated with memory & networking inside a single chip.
Secondly, they’re developing a whole new operating system for The Machine from scratch. They’re also working on a parallel track to develop operating systems based on Linux & Android. These operating systems will support applications that can work with & sift through big data in a way that’s just not possible for the existing platforms in use today.
Obviously, all of this is still just a project in the lab as of now. HP wants to deliver on these technologies by 2020, at which time they hope to put it to the test in the field & see how it handles big data. If it works, you could be using smartphones & computers that literally operate at light speed without wasting energy on electricity.
Here’s a video on The Machine
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