Off-Topic: The Machine

Wed Jun 25 03:31:20 EDT 2014

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> Heh, yes, it's a puff-piece, based on HP's publicity, not an in-depth 
> review. Considering that The Machine isn't publicly available yet, that's 
> hardly surprising.

There's a talk here that goes into a bit more detail,
although still not much:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzbMSR9vA-c
The basic ideas seem to be:
1) An extremely large number of CPU cores, many of them
specialised for particular tasks.
2) A single form of high speed, non-volatile memory, of very
large capacity, replacing cache, RAM, disk, flash, etc.
3) A high-speed optical connection between the CPUs and
the memory.
They claim to be able to retrieve any desired byte out
of a petabyte of storage in 250ns.
That's nice, but the question that comes to my mind is:
What happens when a zillion cores are all competing for
high-speed access to that memory?
-- 
Greg