Here's a gallery from a 40-node version of The Machine (aka HPE's Memory-Driven Computing initiative). These appear to be fibre-optic cables connected to some kind of chip, but it's hard to divine much more than that.

HPE

HPE chose some seriously bright neon green lights for its prototype machine.

HPE

It almost looks radioactive.

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This is apparently one of HPE's X1 silicon photonics interconnect chips (in the middle of the metal clamp thing).

HPE

To create an effective exascale supercomputer from scratch, you must first invent the universesolve three problems: the inordinate power usage (gigawatts) and cooling requirements; developing the architecture and interconnectsto efficiently weave together hundreds of thousands of processorsand memory chips; and devising an operating system and client software that actually scales to onequintillion calculations per second.

You can still physically build an exascale supercomputer without solving all three problemsjust strap together a bunch of CPUs until you hit the magic numberbut it won't perform a billion-billion calculations per second, or it'll be untenably expensive to operate. That seems to be China's approach: plunk down most of the hardware in 2017, and then spend the next few years trying to make it work.

The DoE, on the other hand,is wending its way down a more sedate path by funding HPE (and supercomputer makers) to develop an exascale reference design. The funding is coming from a DoE programme called PathForward, which is part of its larger Exascale Computing Project (ECP). The ECP, which was set up under the Obama administration , has already awarded tens of millions of dollars to various exascale research efforts around the US. It isn't clear how much funding has been received by HPE.

So, what's HPE's plan? And is there any hope that HPEcan pass through three rounds of the DoE funding programme and build an exascale supercomputer before China?

HPE

In addition, and perhaps most importantly, HPE says it has developed software tools that can actually use this huge pool of memory, to derive intelligence or scientific insight from huge data setsevery post on Facebook; the entirety of the Web; the health data of every human on Earth; that kind of thing. Check out this quote from CTO Mark Potter, who apparently thinksHPE's techcan save humankind:We believe Memory-Driven Computing is the solution to move the technology industry forward in a way that can enable advancements across all aspects of society. The architecture we have unveiled can be applied to every computing categoryfrom intelligent edge devices to supercomputers."

In practice I think we're some way from realising Potter's dream, but HPE's tech is certainly a good first step towards exascale. If we compare HPE's efforts to the three main issues I outlined above, you'd probably award a score of about 1.5: they've made inroads on software, power consumption, andscaling, but there's a long way to go, especially when it comes to computational grunt.

After the US government banned the export ofIntel, Nvidia, and AMD chips to China, China's national chip design centre created a256-core RISC chip specifically for supercomputing. All that HPE can offer is the Gen-Z protocol for chip-to-chip communications, and hope thata logic chip maker steps forward.Still, this is just the first stage of funding, where HPE is expected toresearch and developcore technologies that will help the USreachexascale; only if it gets to phase two and three will HPE have to design and then build an exascale machine.

Most of the DoE's exascale funding has so far been on software. Just before this story published, we learnt that the DoE is also announcing funding for AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia under the same PathForward programme. In total, the DoE is handing out $258 million over three years, with the funding recipients also committing to spend at least $172 million of their own funds over the same period. What we don't yet know is what those companies are doing with that funding; hopefully we'll find out more soon.

Now read about how cheap RAM changes computing...

This post originated on Ars Technica UK

Listing image by HPE

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US gov't taps The Machine to beat China to exascale supercomputing - Ars Technica