back to article Stop trying to make The Machine happen, HPE. It's not going to happen

HPE will use a research grant awarded today by the US Department of Energy to develop blueprints for a Machine-based exascale supercomputer. An exascale system is a beast that can hit at least one exaflops – a billion billion floating-point math operations per second. Uncle Sam is bent on getting at least one of these mega- …

  1. Zerolab

    Bed time stories...

    There is a trilogy I read to my kid every night, the machine, memristor and gen-z. Asimov couldn't of done better.

    1. Sooty
      Headmaster

      Re: Bed time stories...

      I'm sure he could have

  2. Nate Amsden

    I'm sure

    The SGI tech HP acquired when they bought SGI will play a big role. Probably much bigger than the machine stuff.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm sure

      How much of SGI (people, places, things) was left by the time HPE bought them?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Are they getting their ideas from TV?

    Samaritan is the evil one you know...

    And yes, we know that we are being watched by all sorts of TLA/FLA agencies.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ... early space race, which saw Russia launch its Sputnik satellite ...

    A nitpick here. Sputnik was designed, built, and launched by the USSR, not Russia. The distinction is important: most of the USSR's rocketry design and manufacturing was based in Ukraine; the launch pad was in Kazakhstan; the orbital vehicle (and later manned vehicles) were mostly designed and built in Russia; a lot of later orbital science work was prepared in the three Baltic republics.

    Just because Russia became the legal successor to the Soviet Union, and managed to hang on to the most destructive parts of its legacy, both in terms or the artifacts and the mindset, does not mean we should ignore the others when we talk about the history of the space race. Until a better term comes along, let's stick to the USSR, shall we?

    1. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: ... early space race, which saw Russia launch its Sputnik satellite ...

      Fair point - now changed. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.co.uk so we can fix up stuff straight away rather via reading the comments a day later.

      C.

  5. austint

    "These computers will be so powerful, they could each catalogue an iTunes music folder in less than ten minutes."

    Oh, brave new world...

  6. John Sanders
    Alert

    Unfathomable power!

    >> These computers will be so powerful, they could each catalogue an iTunes music folder in less than ten minutes.

    Inconceivable, who would have thought this would one day be possible 15 years ago.

    1. Alistair
      Pint

      Re: Unfathomable power!

      @JS

      .... " I do not think that means what you think it means ....."

      (Its Friday, and well, fun.)

  7. C_L

    iTunes

    >>These computers will be so powerful, they could each catalogue an iTunes music folder in less than ten minutes.

    I think you'll get an invite from Tim this year ;-)

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    National Security

    So they're trying to build the best John the Ripper or Reaver machine?

  9. yet_another_wumpus

    To be honest, the latest PR I've heard from people claiming to speak for HPE say it is all about having non-volitile memory. Presumably for non-HPE jobs this would be something cheaper than DRAM, but I'm sure it will be more expensive once somebody trots out the magic word "enterprise".

    In this new form, it should basically be a drop in replacement for normal devices. Just less likely to suffer certain failures (assuming they use DRAM as a write-through cache). Expect things to be relatively simple until PHBs decide to remove code that can't fail due to the "machine's" new ideal memory.

  10. well meaning but ultimately self defeating

    It happened

    They called it the mainframe

  11. 45RPM Silver badge

    I've lost count of the times that I've told 'partners' from HPE that I don't give a shit about The Machine. They never seem to believe me though. Apollo, I like. The Machine is boring - it's just a future-washing of todays technology - but there's nothing really futuristic about it.

  12. well meaning but ultimately self defeating

    Stop trying to reinvent the mainframe

    IBM-envy

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