Hewlett Packard Enterprise Puts The Machine In the “Open”
June 7, 2016 • Blog Post
HPE brings its most ambitious research project to the open source community
Today, HPE is announcing an exciting initiative to bring The Machine to open source developers very early in the software development cycle. The initiative invites the open source community to collaborate on HPE's largest and most notable research project, which is focused on reinventing the computer architecture on which all computers have been built for the past 60 years. This announcement extends HPE's longstanding commitment to and participation in open source software.
The heart of The Machine is memory. This is so different from the processor-centric architectures of today that we call The Machine architecture Memory-Driven Computing. Given the fundamental shift in how The Machine will work, the initiative aims to start familiarizing developers with its new programming model as well as invite them to help develop the software itself. This is an uncommonly early opportunity for developers to help build components of The Machine from the ground up, since much of the software is in the starting phases.
The initiative, marked by an initial release of developer tools, aims to grow during the coming months to be one of the most transformative, enterprise-supported projects in the open source community. Interested developers can visit The Machine community page to reach the corresponding projects on Github and start contributing to code development now.
The developer tools available now include the following four contributions of code:
1) Fast optimistic engine for data unification services: A completely new database engine that speeds up applications by taking advantage of a large number of CPU cores and non-volatile memory (NVM).
2) Fault-tolerant programming model for non-volatile memory: Adapts existing multi-threaded code to store and use data directly in persistent memory. Provides simple, efficient fault-tolerance in the event of power failures or program crashes.
3) Fabric Attached Memory Emulation: An environment designed to allow users to explore the new architectural paradigm of The Machine.
4) Performance emulation for non-volatile memory bandwidth: A DRAM-based performance emulation platform that leverages features available in commodity hardware to emulate different latency and bandwidth characteristics of future byte-addressable NVM technologies.
These tools enable existing communities to capitalize on how Memory-Driven Computing is leading to breakthroughs in machine learning, graph analytics, event processing and correlation.
In the coming months, HPE intends to enhance this code as well as release additional contributions, focused on everything from changes to Linux® that enable it to run on The Machine to example applications that demonstrate how The Machine can significantly improve application scale and performance.
The Machine & Software Development
The technology architecture on which computing is based hasn't changed in more than sixty years. Incremental improvements have powered some amazing innovations, but the limitations of the current architecture, combined with the explosion of data, will soon start to limit progress.
The Machine aims to address these limitations by enabling a massive and essential leap forward in computing performance and efficiency. Through this program, HPE is reinventing the architecture that currently serves as the foundation for which all computing is based - from smartphones to data centers to super computers - from the ground up.
Software is among the technologies under development for this new architecture, offering an opportunity for both HPE and the open source community to collaborate on new solutions that will enable a better path forward.
HPE's Open Source Strategy
Open source software is a strategic priority for HPE. Last June, HPE released Grommet -the most advanced open source user experience framework for enterprise applications - under an open source license so that it could be used by the IT industry.
During the past year, Grommet has expanded considerably and now has more than 32 contributors spanning agencies, startups and HPE. Grommet has been used to create several rich, responsive user experiences for HPE offerings, including the new HPE Hyper Converged 380 system and the HPE AppPulse Mobile suite of products.
In addition, the company continues to contribute to other open source projects such as the OpenStack® and Cloud Foundry® projects, and recently announced a collaboration with Hortonworks on Spark.
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