A look at The Machine

It is different from other HPC systems in some important ways.

A pure single-system-image multi-processor machine shares everything between nodes, and is cache coherent. A network cluster shares nothing between nodes and copies data around using a network.

The Machine is in-between these worlds; sharing 'something', in the form of a large fabric-attached memory pool. Each SoC runs a separate operating system out of a small amount of local memory, and then accesses the large pool of shared memory purely as a data store, not part of the main machine memory. So, it looks like a cluster in many ways, with an extremely fast memory-mapped peripheral.

The first instance we're building holds 320TB of memory (80 nodes of 4TB each), which is larger than ARM or x86 can address, so we *can't* make it look like a single flat address space, even if we wanted to.

Memristor will make the store persistent, silicon photonics will allow us to build a far denser system. What we're building today is designed to help get the rest of the hardware and software ecosystem ready for that.