Brussels / 4 & 5 February 2017

schedule

Free Software For The Machine


The Machine is a hardware project at Hewlett Packard Enterprise which takes a new look at computer architecture. With many processors and large amounts of directly addressable storage, The Machine program has offered an equally large opportunity for developing new system software. Our team at HPE has spent the better part of two years writing new software and adapting existing software to expose the capabilities of the hardware to application developers.

Taking off from my presentation at LCA 2016, this presentation will explore the changes we've made throughout the Linux environment, from security infrastructure to new file systems.

As directly addressable storage is such a large part of the new hardware, this presentation will focus on a couple of important bits of free software which expose that to applications, including our Librarian File System and Managed Data Structures libraries.

Managed Data Structures introduces a new application programming paradigm where the application works directly on the stable storage form for data structures, eliminating serialization and de-serialization operations.

Finally, the presentation will describe how the hardware is managed, from sequencing power to a rack full of high-performance computing hardware, through constructing custom Linux operating systems for each processor and managing all of them as parts of a single computing platform.

Speakers

Photo of Keith Packard Keith Packard

Links