In a unique move, HPE has announced that it will give open source developers access to The Machine very early in its software development cycle. The initiative will certainly help HPE achieve their goal of reinventing the computer architecture that has been used over the past 60 years. HPE is known for their support of open-source development in the past, including its recently announced open infrastructure portfolio for the service provider market.
In a unique move, HPE has announced that it will give open source developers access to The Machine very early in its software development cycle. The initiative will certainly help HPE achieve their goal of reinventing the computer architecture that has been used over the past 60 years. HPE is known for their support of open-source development in the past, including its recently announced open infrastructure portfolio for the service provider market.
The Machine architecture has been touted as “memory-driven computing” by HPE. This open source initiative plans familiarize developers with its new programming model, indicating that they will invite them to help develop the software itself. This is a rare opportunity for developers to help build The Machine’s components from the ground up, as the software development is still in its infancy. This will also provide both parties (HPE and the open source community) with an opportunity to collaborate on new solutions that will help create better momentum towards the company’s goal.
In the first stage of this initiative, HPE released early developer tools; however, they intend to eventually become one of the “most transformative, enterprise-supported projects in the open source community”. That being said, those who wish to participate immediately can visit The Machine community page to reach the corresponding projects on Github.
HPE indicates the following available developer tools, all of which focus on four contributions of code:
- 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).
- 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.
- Fabric Attached Memory Emulation: An environment designed to allow users to explore the new architectural paradigm of The Machine.
- 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.
As mentioned above, HPE plans to enhance this code with additional contributions as the project moves forward.
