Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced the launch of an incubation practice with specialised skills for solving big data problems through Memory-Driven Computing, leveraging the expertise of Hewlett Packard Labs and HPE Pointnext. Through HPE Pointnext advisory and professional services capabilities, the company will work with customers to explore Memory-Driven Computing applications and deliver proofs-of-concept that will demonstrate performance gains.
Memory-Driven Computing is a new computing architecture that puts memory, not processing, at the centre of the computing platform. Hewlett Packard Labs is developing the technology innovations needed to enable Memory-Driven Computing as part of ‘The Machine’ research project. Using the new architecture, organisations will be able to process vast amounts of data significantly faster and reduce the time to extract insight significantly.
“We believe that all data is valuable. Our vision for Memory-Driven Computing is to enable customers to capture, keep and refine every last bit of their data, up to 10,000 times faster than yesterday’s solutions. The introduction of HPE Pointnext capabilities for Memory-Driven Computing will accelerate our ability to bring Memory-Driven Computing technologies to our customers and help them solve some of their most complex problems and more quickly than ever before,” said Rajesh Dhar, Senior Director, Pointnext, HPE India.
HPE Pointnext has a team of emerging technology and AI experts already working hand-in-hand with its first commercial customer beginning the journey to Memory-Driven Computing, Travelport – a commerce platform that provides distribution, technology, payment and other solutions for the US$ 7 trillion global travel industry.
Partnering with HPE, Travelport has built out a large-scale compute capability, internally referred to as the “wall of compute,” which has been able to keep pace with the increasing demand of online travel searches. The volume of shopping requests continues to double every 18 months and will reach an average of three shopping requests per month per person on the globe by 2020. Today, that already translates to moving over 125 terabytes of data in and out of its data centres each day.
In April 2018, Travelport began the first commercial Memory-Driven Computing engagement, installing an HPE Superdome Flex in-memory computing system and leveraging HPE’s expertise to rearchitect key Travelport algorithms using Memory-Driven Computing programming techniques.
HPE Pointnext is providing guidance to Travelport around IT deployment strategy, sharing expertise and learnings from previous POCs to improve their ability to programme applications for Memory-Driven Computing environments. Additionally, HPE experts are helping Travelport and future customers identify a performance baseline for infrastructure upgrades, drive cost-benefit analyses for the transformation journey and port, tune, re-architect and refactor applications for Memory-Driven Computing.
“Travelport handles incredibly huge data sets and demanding workloads. A Memory-Driven Computing approach will help Travelport quickly uncover insights in those data sets, as well as realise performance gains never before possible. Working closely with HPE, Travelport will be able to test new technologies as they become available and remain at the forefront of in-memory computing advancements and by extension, the travel industry,” said Randy Meyer, Vice President and General Manager – Compute Solutions, HPE.
As HPE Pointnext continues to work with customers on Memory-Driven Computing solutions, the team will unveil additional innovations and offerings for Memory-Driven Computing adoption, beginning with rapid assessments and proof-of-value services next year.
Accessing Memory-Driven Computing
Through a collaboration between HPE Pointnext, Hewlett Packard Labs and HPE’s own global IT organisation, HPE is introducing a Memory-Driven Computing operating and development environment for customers and developers around the world.
The Memory-Driven Computing Sandbox will feature HPE Superdome Flex with software-defined scalable memory, a new system enhancement under development and key technology output of The Machine research project. Software-defined scalable memory includes new software and firmware advances that enable the industry-leading Superdome Flex memory fabric to address significantly larger pools of shared memory than previously possible. The technology provides the ability to compose memory on the fabric and offers the ability to scale to 96 terabytes, all while offering faster and more resilient performance.
“In the Memory-Driven Computing Sandbox, our customers’ developer teams will be able to experiment right along with the Hewlett Packard Labs team. First with DZNE and now with Travelport, we have seen how quickly innovation is sparked when Memory-Driven Computing technologies get into developers’ hands, and their work helps inspire and shape our research agenda. This programme will support rapid testing for customers and will provide early access to emerging technologies, directly from the labs, before broad commercial availability. It’s a 21st century mash up between Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard’s edict to ‘design for the engineer on the next bench’ and today’s agile development methodologies,” said Kirk Bresniker, VP, HPE Fellow and Chief Architect for Memory-Driven Computing.
As part of its strategy to commercialise innovations from The Machine research project, HPE will look for opportunities to bring select benefits of Memory-Driven Computing – like software-defined scalable memory – to customers faster.
Under The Machine research project, HPE is advancing toward a single architecture to manage a customer’s entire enterprise, from every edge to any cloud. Through this work, HPE aims to one day power a mesh of precision systems specific to individual workloads – from distributed systems that sit at the edge to mission-critical systems at the core of its customer’s operations – all connected through a secure common operating platform.
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