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A comment on With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Computer. Parent comment

Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by markbnj on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:13PM (#7879488)
You'd probably still have memory partitioned into persistent areas and runtime heap of a sort, and you might very well continue to use the file system metaphor because it still makes sense to humans. Whether a file is bits on magnetic disk, in flash memory, or fast persistent RAM isn't all that meaningful to the user. As for sharing, I don't see why this would be an issue. If you have to move memory contents between machines then you still need some sort of external transport, whether it is a network, or a glowing glass cube.
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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sp332 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:25PM (#7879561)
Filesystem semantics are a bottleneck. Fusion IO had to get rid of them when they demoed their billion-IOPS platform last year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434711

For communicating data between programs, would you create a filesystem object that points to memory inside your program, or what?

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by colanderman on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @03:14PM (#7879868)
That doesn't make any sense. Create a file, memory-map it, bam, you have RAM performance with "filesystem semantics". (There is NO overhead associated with memory-mapping a file on a ramdisk in the Linux kernel.)

Probably what they're referring to is something more along the lines of replacing SCSI or NFS with a protocol that is a better match for the random access patterns used to access in-memory structures. (Hence their 64-byte I/O size; that is equal to a cache line on Intel architectures.)

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by sp332 on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:55PM (#7880399)
Hm, how would this memristor stuff connect to the system? Will it look like a memory controller or more like PCI-e flash?
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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by wmf on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @06:33PM (#7880830)
It sounds like HP is pitching it as memory.
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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by DelwinAmber on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:38PM (#7879636)
Yes. On Linux it's /dev/shm and it is a ramdisk that you can access from multiple processes.

IPC (Inter-Process Communication) is a known technology. This won't change it much if at all.

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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by melloclello on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:38PM (#7879642)
Continuing to use the file-system metaphor (Instead of, I don't know, anything else, perhaps some kind of global namespace with built-in versioning like Urbit's) seems like lobotomising this incredible new paradigm before it is even born.
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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by markbnj on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @04:09PM (#7880142)
It might be. I'm not arguing that it is the ultimate best metaphor to use, but these things do tend to be adopted organically and become very entrenched.
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Re:With 'The Machine,' HP May Have Invented a New Kind of Co... by hderms on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @02:16PM (#7879514)
Took the words right out of my mouth (better said, of course).
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