HP Unveils Revolutionary Computer That Could Shrink A Data Center To The Size Of A Refrigerator

Business Insider ^ | 06/12/2014 | Julie Bort

[SeekAndFind]

HP demonstrated on Wednesday a breakthrough computer project from HP Labs known internally as "The Machine." The new computer was the highlight of a keynote speech by CEO Meg Whitman and CTO Martin Fink, the head of HP Labs, at the company's HP Discover customer conference being held this week in Las Vegas.

The Machine is a project that, if successful, could replace a giant data center worth of gear with a computer the size of a refrigerator, reports Businessweek's Ashlee Vance.

More importantly, it will instantly process mind-boggling amounts of data while sipping only a tiny bit of energy. Whitman says the machine will mean "energy consumption problems will virtually disappear" for data centers.

That compares to today, where if cloud computing were a country, in terms of energy consumption, it would rank fifth in the world, Whitman says.

Basically, the machine uses a new homegrown operating system, a new superfast way to transfer data that uses light (i.e. photonics) instead of the copper wiring traditionally used by Ethernet cables and a whole new kind of memory called "memristors."

A memristor is a type of memory that HP says is faster and more efficient than flash memory. Its claim to fame is that it doesn't lose data even when a device loses power or runs out of battery. HP isn't the only company working on these technologies, although it is a particular pioneer on the science of memristors.

Assembling all of these brand new technologies into a new type of computer is almost a "Back To The Future" type of strategy.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: HP-UX is HP’s Unix.
And I’m pretty sure that system isn’t running VMS. ;)

____________________________

BTW, HP owns VMS via their acquisition of Compaq ( which acquired DEC, the company that designed VMS ).

And personally, of all the operating systems I’ve worked with, I still like VMS the most.

[rarestia]

To be fair, 120 TB isn’t that much storage in today’s terms. That’s two 25-disk DAS trays full of 4 TB SAS disks in a RAID5.

Cisco’s UCS offerings put massive amounts of networking and computing into a 10RU chassis that can run circles around HP’s latest BladeSystems. And this is coming from an HP fanboy!

[The KG9 Kid]

Many people earned a good living on building enterprises with VMS, it's true. It's one of those long lasting systems people speak fondly of.

It hasn't had a new release in ten years at least.

[zeugma]

How do you know? HP owns a stable of main frame class operating systems now: openVMS, Tandem Himalaya, Ultrix, the HP version of Unix (whatever that was). They are capable of cranking out something a little more substantial than BSD.

I hope they bring back MPE-V.

I want to kill print jobs again by using the 'deletespoolfile' command again.

Sadly, there are some features of the MPE JCL that I still miss.

 

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

BFL