The Machine is an experimental computer made by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It was created as part of a research project to develop a new type of computer architecture for servers. The design focused on a “memory centric computing” architecture, where NVRAM replaced traditional DRAM and disks in the memory hierarchy. The NVRAM was byte addressable and could be accessed from any CPU via a photonic interconnect. The aim of the project was to build and evaluate this new design.
Hardware overview
The Machine was a computer cluster with many individual nodes connected over a memory fabric. The fabric interconnect used VCSEL-based silicon photonics with a custom chip called the X1. Access to memory is non-uniform and may include multiple hops. The Machine was envisioned to be a rack-scale computer initially with 80 processors and 320 TB of fabric attached memory, with potential for scaling to more enclosures up to 32 ZB. The fabric attached memory is not cache coherent and requires software to be aware of this property. Since traditional locks need cache coherency, hardware was added to the bridges to do atomic operations at...
Phantasm
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