Hardware
With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of
Computer
If Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard
are spinning in their graves, they may be due for a break. Their namesake
company is cooking up some awfully ambitious industrial-strength computing
technology that, if and when it’s released, could replace a data center’s worth
of equipment with a single refrigerator-size machine.
Photograph
by Richard Lewington/Hewlett-PackardHP CTO Martin Fink in the Photonics
laboratory at HP LabsThat’s what they’re calling it at HP Labs: “the Machine.”
It’s basically a brand-new type of computer architecture that HP’s engineers
say will serve as a replacement for today’s designs, with a new operating
system, a different type of memory, and superfast data transfer. The company
says it will bring the Machine to market within the next few years or fall on
its face trying. “We think we have no choice,” says Martin Fink, the chief
technology officer and head of HP Labs, who is expected to unveil HP’s plans at
a conference Wednesday.
A decade ago, it wouldn’t seem as
outlandish as it now does for a company such as HP, IBM (IBM), or Sun Microsystems to build a new computer
architecture from the ground up. The hardware powerhouses, known as systems
companies, all made their own chips, networking technology, and custom OS. Then
commodity components became more powerful, and better data center software
began to make up for deficiencies in the cheaper hardware. Consumer Web
companies such as Google, Amazon.com (AMZN), and Yahoo! (YHOO) advanced new data center designs that
were quickly adopted by the mainstream, shrinking the market share of the
systems companies.
HP Labs, the company’s R&D arm,
was once revered throughout Silicon Valley as a steady source of new products
that could open up new markets. It’s been far less inspiring in recent years,
ginning up a mishmash of mobile software, printing services, and
teleconferencing systems that haven’t made it to customers in a meaningful way.
Amid budget cuts, a costly, complex new computer system would seem like a
stretch.
The Machine started to take shape
two years ago, after Fink was named director of HP Labs. Assessing the
company’s projects, he says, made it clear that HP was developing the needed
components to create a better computing system. Among its research projects: a
new form of memory known as memristors; and silicon photonics, the transfer of
data inside a computer using light instead of copper wires. And its researchers
have worked on operating systems including Windows, Linux, HP-UX, Tru64, and
NonStop.
Photograph by Richard Lewington/Hewlett-PackardA memristor characterization experiment at HP Labs
Fink and his colleagues decided to pitch HP Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman on the idea of assembling all this technology to form the Machine. During a two-hour presentation held a year and a half ago, they laid out how the computer might work, its benefits, and the expectation that about 75 percent of HP Labs personnel would be dedicated to this one project. “At the end, Meg turned to [Chief Financial Officer] Cathie Lesjak and said, ‘Find them more money,’” says John Sontag, the vice president of systems research at HP, who attended the meeting and is in charge of bringing the Machine to life. “People in Labs see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
Memory represents perhaps the
biggest opportunity for change. Computers have worked in a similar way for many
years now. When a person wants to do something such as run Microsoft Word, the
computer’s central processor will issue a command to copy the program and a
document from the slow disk it had been sitting on and bring it temporarily
into the high-speed memory known as DRAM that sits near the computer’s core,
helping ensure that Word and the file you’re working on will run fast.
A problem with this architecture,
according to computing experts, is that DRAM and the Flash memory used in
computers seem unable to keep pace with the increase in data use. As the
current memory technology hits its physical limits, dozens of companies
continue to work on possible replacements. “Everyone on the planet who is
paying any attention to this type of thing wants to see this new kind of fast,
cheap, persistent memory,” says Greg Papadopoulos, a partner at the venture
capital firm New Enterprise Associates. “If one of these things works, and one
of them will, it will change computing architecture fundamentally.
No comments:
Post a Comment