HP Will Release a “Revolutionary” New Operating System in 2015

[steve2470]

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/533066/hp-will-release-a-revolutionary-new-operating-system-in-2015/

snip

The company’s research division is working to create a computer HP calls The Machine. It is meant to be the first of a new dynasty of computers that are much more energy-efficient and powerful than current products. HP aims to achieve its goals primarily by using a new kind of computer memory instead of the two types that computers use today. The current approach originated in the 1940s, and the need to shuttle data back and forth between the two types of memory limits performance.

snip



A working prototype of The Machine should be ready by 2016, says Bresniker. However, he wants researchers and programmers to get familiar with how it will work well before then. His team aims to complete an operating system designed for The Machine, called Linux++, in June 2015. Software that emulates the hardware design of The Machine and other tools will be released so that programmers can test their code against the new operating system. Linux++ is intended to ultimately be replaced by an operating system designed from scratch for The Machine, which HP calls Carbon.

Programmers’ experiments with Linux++ will help people understand the project and aid HP’s progress, says Bresniker. He hopes to gain more clues about, for example, what types of software will benefit most from the new approach.

[jmowreader]

1. HP's fixin' to get sued by Apple over the name of their follow-on OS

Apple calls one of the two Mac OS X application frameworks Carbon. (The other is Cocoa.)

Come on guys, it's not like there aren't 117 more elements to choose a name from.

[kentauros]

8. Yeah, but I don't think their marketing department could do much with the likes of

Molybdenum, Praseodymium, Roentgenium, and other difficult to spell and pronounce elements

Not to mention the relative lack of science knowledge among the general populace.

[jmowreader]

23. But they could do plenty with...

Hydrogen, helium, platinum, beryllium...actually, Beryllium would make for fun, Galaxy Quest-themed ads featuring Tim Allen and the guy who played Commander Mathesar.

[kentauros]

24. How about "Omega-13"?

And if it ever crashes, it could count down and stop at 00:00:01.

"Oh, it always does that."

[jmowreader]

27. Omega-13 would be a hell of a name for their version of SMP/E

On an IBM mainframe, all software upgrades are handled through System Modification Program...which lets you revert to the previous version easily if the new one isn't right. (All together now: Damn, I wish Mac/Windows/Linus/DOS/CP-M could do that!) On big iron you need that, so The Machine will probably have it.

[kentauros]

32. Just without the cool effects when it reverts

[Recursion]

2. Interesting. I assume it's a POSIX API at the high level? (nt)

[RKP5637]

3. One would surely hope so than a giant step backward. n/t

[Uben]

4. HP? It's gonna be trash

I won't buy any HP products. Customer service sucks and you can't understand the foreigners who are supposed to be helping. Every HP product I have bought was junk. Fuck Meg Whitman, too. She fucked up Ebay and she is not addressing the problems HP has, so I hope they go belly up. The techs they have are just operators who read off of a help sheet. If that doesn't work, you have to send it in to be fixed and when you get it back, it's not.

WARNING: DO NOT BUY HP!

[djean111]

5. I used to be an HP-3000 system manager. Loved it! KILLED IBM mainframes in terms of

accessibility and operability.
Great machine, wonderful third party software, too. My only complaint was that I seemed to always be debugging the new operating system installation instructions; on the bright side, as I struggled through the install, I would get handed over to new and friendly sets of actual HP support engineers all over the world, as the time zones made necessary. Favorite guys were in Australia.

HP screwed up a bit when they told the Tandem guys to go ahead and keep your cute little multi-cpu and non-stop idea; of course, now HP has bought Tandem, uses multiple CPUs, and Tandem (my favorite system manager gig) is no more.
Anyway, nostalgia aside, Fiorina killed HP. Turned all the engineers into salesmen, which they hated. The actual salesmen would spend a lot of time burrowing into my company's IT organisation and then proposing more and more machines and rearranging the support setups, trying to move actual employees around to suit their schemes. One salesman would even call me directly and try to give me orders. Bold, but had the opposite effect from what he wanted. Plus, they would sell the company a shitload of desktops "guaranteed to be effective for years!!!", and then pop back in within the year explaining why the company needed to replace them all with new ones. Because they had new quotas. One salesman I had liked and respected for years actually committed suicide.

They started refusing to do any sort of benchmark or stress tests when proposing to replace, say, Tandems, expecting managers to just take the words from the shiny sales brochures.

Anyway, IMO Carly Fiorina killed HP, and is the biggest, shiniest, nastiest reason to scoff at claims that a woman would of course be better than a man as a CEO. Meg Whitman is just mopping up the survivors.

[LiberalArkie]

15. I liked Tandems, they reminded me of Nortel DMS500 switches.

[Renew Deal]

6. I've had good experiences with HP

They are very good at PC's, workstations, and servers.

[madokie]

11. I've had two HP computer that I liked well

most help desks I've called into work off a help sheet. Every one of them has as a matter of fact whether it be my ISP or the lift kit on my golf cart. Call your satellite company sometime with a question on needing some help and see what you get there, same thing

[Uben]

14. You're right

I got the same tech treatment with DirecTV...help sheet. But, they have resolved the issues every time for me, so I can't complain. And, at least their product worked when purchased. Been with them 15 yrs and I would recommend them based on MY experience. I'm aware every product has its share of duds, but two in a row? I learn quickly.

[Uben]

13. This is just my personal experience with HP

I'm sure there are many people with good experiences or they wouldn't be in business. But, you gotta go with what you know, and what I know is that my experience has not been good or acceptable. I will never buy any of their products again. It wasn't really the hardware but the software that was the problem. Why don't they do a little quality control and test the units before sending them out?
No one likes to buy something only to find out its a dud when they get home. When it happens twice in a row, it leaves a very bitter taste in one's mouth.

[dilby]

26. This will be an Enterprise system made in America and supported in America.

All their Enterprise level systems are done that way, their home line is produced in whatever country is cheapest and support is out of India.

[Xithras]

29. HP's consumer products went to shit when they bought Compaq.

Carly Fiorina killed that company. Outsourcing, trying to transform a technology company into a desktop computer company, buying Compaq and adopting their shitty product lines while killing off HP's long-venerated hardware...everything she did caused harm to that company.

The nostalgic part of me wishes that someone could fix HP and turn them back into what they once were, but the practical part of me knows that it's never going to happen.

That said, the Sprout is probably one of the coolest machines you can buy today, and the Carbon announcement bodes well. It means that they're at least making an effort to regain their former place as an innovator, instead of an also-ran. I think it's probably too-little, too-late though.

[Recursion]

36. HP-UX was a decent OS back in the day

Their servers have been pretty good in my experience

[bemildred]

7. Reeks of hype. nt

[kentauros]

9. So, it's a "New & Improved" Linux then?

Not actually an entirely new operating system? I'm assuming by the name alone that it's a derivation of Linux, and not, as the hype implies, an OS that's been designed from the machine code up without prior reliance on existing programming.

Well, just let me know when they finally create true optical computers ("electronics" and CPUs that compute via photons instead of electrons.)

[jeff47]

17. No, it's a bad title.

They're making new hardware, not a new OS. The new hardware will use memristor-based RAM instead of having RAM and disk drives.

[kentauros]

20. Okay, thanks.

That is some bad reporting then. I understood that they were using better RAM, but it sure did read like they had developed a whole new kind of OS.

[jeff47]

21. They made an OS that emulates the new machine

in the hopes that other people will figure out nifty ways to exploit the new setup so that they have some marketing materials when they launch the new hardware.

[kentauros]

22. As I read it,

they used Linux++ to operate the new HS (Hardware System) and not necessarily a new OS (Operating System.) It may be an "OS" in some way, but not in the common vernacular, which would be the equivalent of Windows, OS X, and any of the Linux GUIs out there. The writer of the article needs to point out that it's more like an OS of the new hardware only, like one level up from machine language. A direct user-interface OS doesn't seem to exist as yet.

The reporting of the story wasn't written well for a technology review. Heavy emphasis on the hardware advancement, with just a cursory bit about the software, and how it'll work with the new technology.

This is all we get on anything resembling their talk of a "new OS":

A working prototype of The Machine should be ready by 2016, says Bresniker. However, he wants researchers and programmers to get familiar with how it will work well before then. His team aims to complete an operating system designed for The Machine, called Linux++, in June 2015. Software that emulates the hardware design of The Machine and other tools will be released so that programmers can test their code against the new operating system. Linux++ is intended to ultimately be replaced by an operating system designed from scratch for The Machine, which HP calls Carbon.

[MurrayDelph]

34. That makes more sense

HP doesn't create operating systems; if anything, they buy the proprietary ones and kill them off.

(Says the guy who used to teach VMS and owns an HP Touchpad running WebOS).

There's a reason I edited the signature on my Touchpad include the words

"HP - where great operating systems go to die."

[sendero]

10. If HP is doing this...

.. I think I'll wait for a well managed company to follow on. I don't think I could buy anything made by that outfit.

[dilby]

28. It's not something you would probably buy because it's an enterprise level server.

Would be used in a data center, this wont be a home OS probably will be command line only as well with no desktop.

[IDemo]

12. Interesting - it looks like the memristor's time has come

The memristor circuits reported in Nature are also capable of both memory and logic, functions that are done in separate devices in today’s computers. “Most of the energy used for computation today is used to move the data around” between the hard drive and the processor, says Williams. A future memristor-based device that provided both functions could save a lot of energy and help computers keep getting faster, even as silicon reaches its physical limits.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/418370/memristor-memory-readied-for-production/page/2/

[seabeckind]

16. I've been satisfied with HP hardware

everything has been very solid out of the box.

Something I cannot say about all the other manufacturers, just about all of whom do nothing in the way of innovation, just shove out some mimicware.

Dell sux big time.

Apple innovates but only for Apple. They are more focused on market share and preventing third parties from skimming any of their profits.

The problems I have had with HP always stemmed from the 3rd parties that insist on implementations that force me to operate in their paradigm rather than what I want to do.

Like the msft offering for the laptop that tries to make it work like a tablet. Half the functions require me to reach out and touch the screen and then try to guess where it'll take me next. No choice on the add-on apps -- doesn't everybody want up-to-the-minute weather? Or breaking news about the golden globes?

True about the HP mgmt but that is a result of the Age of the MBAs and it affects every corporation. ANd our reaganesque (sp?) gov't.

[jeff47]

18. Article has a very bad title.

HP isn't making a new operating system. They're making a new design for hardware.

Today, computers have fast, temporary storage in the form of RAM. When you turn the computer off, the data in RAM disappears. As a result, we use disks for long-term storage. In order to run the programs on the computer, the program is copied from disk into RAM, and then the copy in RAM is used by the CPU to run the program.

HP's machine just has RAM. It uses something called memristors in the RAM so that the data does not disappear when the computer is turned off. So there's no need for a hard disk.

RAM is roughly 1000x faster than reading from a disk, while using far less power. So eliminating the disk for the OS and programs should result in a much faster machine with lower power consumption.

[jmowreader]

25. They're also making a new OS

The box will drop with Linux on it; later, they'll release a new OS called Carbon which will be built in-house.

As all of us who dealt with HP9000s know, HP at least used to be able to write a good OS. Assuming the guys who thought the HP9000 was a good idea, and not the guys who thought their first latex ink was a good idea, work on Carbon I think it'll be okay.

Question One remains: who is this for? Hopefully the guys who buy IBM Z Series mainframes. Big iron has a bright future; two big machines with built-in redundancy draw less power than ten thousand little ones.

[lpbk2713]

19. Better have a lot of HD space if it's from HP.

That's the common point I have found with HP products.

[herding cats]

30. It looks like memristor tech is moving along quite well.

I suppose that's necessary in this day and age just to stay ahead of the curve though. I've been intrigued by this concept since I first read about it earlier this year.

HP plans to launch memristor, silicon photonic computer within the decade

In 2008, scientists at HP invented a fourth fundamental component to join the resistor, capacitor, and inductor: the memristor. Theorized back in 1971, memristors showed promise in computing as they can be used to both build logic gates, the building blocks of processors, and also act as long-term storage.

At its HP Discover conference in Las Vegas today, HP announced an ambitious plan to use memristors to build a system, called simply "The Machine," shipping as soon as the end of the decade. By 2016, the company plans to have memristor-based DIMMs, which will combine the high storage densities of hard disks with the high performance of traditional DRAM.

John Sontag, vice president of HP Systems Research, said that The Machine would use "electrons for processing, photons for communication, and ions for storage." The electrons are found in conventional silicon processors, and the ions are found in the memristors. The photons are because the company wants to use optical interconnects in the system, built using silicon photonics technology. With silicon photonics, photons are generated on, and travel through, "circuits" etched onto silicon chips, enabling conventional chip manufacturing to construct optical parts. This allows the parts of the system using photons to be tightly integrated with the parts using electrons.

If HP can build such a computer, it may prove revolutionary. The memory hierarchy is, for many computing applications, the fundamental performance bottleneck. Memory can be very fast but very small, such as the cache on a processor, or very slow but very large, such as spinning hard disks. RAM (fast, small) and flash (slower but larger than RAM, faster but smaller than hard disk) fall somewhere in between. Shuffling data between these different kinds of memory, and ensuring that the right data is in the right place for optimal performance, is a significant bottleneck.

High-speed optical interconnects combined with memristor memory could shake all that up by alleviating, if not removing entirely, that size/performance trade-off. At Discover, HP said that this could enable, for example, databases that can handle hundreds of billions of updates per second.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hp-plans-to-launch-memristor-silicon-photonic-computer-within-the-decade/

[Xithras]

31. If HP is actually building a memristor based computer, that's freaking incredible.

No hard drive. No ram. No cache. Permanent, changeable memory that can be merged directly with the processor cores.

Memristors were theorized back in the 70's, but were long thought impossible because they technically violate the laws of thermodynamics. HP claimed to have solved the problem seven or eight years ago, and predicted that they'd be available in less than two years. When that date came and went, most people assumed that they were peddling vaporware. Even among those who believe that HP actually did invent something, there's a HUGE amount of debate over whether it's really a memristor, or simply a device that works like a memristor.

If HP really building a functional and commercially reproducible memristor-based computer, then the fundamental architecture used to design everything from computers to smart phones is about to be overhauled. The reason that so many companies have invested decades of work and untold dollars into researching this technology is that it has the capability of making our existing computers look like those old desktop calculators from the 1970's...primitive, slow, featureless, energy hogs.

And they're coupling it with a photonic bus?!?! Wow

What I REALLY want to know is cost. It's a given that this will be a multimillion dollar computer system, but how many millions in that multi?

[steve2470]

33. official site

http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/systems-research/themachine/

[Xithras]

35. HP redefined memristor to fit their device.

True memristors cannot exist in the physical world because they violate the laws of thermodynamics. It looks like HP did an end-run around this by inventing an entirely new device that uses a titanium dioxide film to achieve the same effects of a memristor, without actually building one. They're calling it a memristor, even though it technically is not.

It's semantics, really. Whether it's a true memristor or a workalike, the long term implications are pretty big. Nearly as big as the jump from vacuum tube to transistor based computers. If it works.

[Recursion]

39. Yeah. The linear regime is very narrow and fragile (or was 5 years ago when I last studied it)

But it does actually "work": it's a stateless integrator in the frequency domain.

[Recursion]

37. We did some basic memristor stuff in grad school a few years ago; they were usable enough

in the lab (though apparently absurdly expensive at the time). From a math standpoint the idea is kind of absurd (it's an integrator without state), but the equations do work out; the problem is their linear regime is a lot narrower and a lot more fragile than traditional linear circuit elements.

[Recursion]

38. Holy shit. A photonic bus too?

Sign me up.

(I almost bought a mothballed Cray on Craigslist a few years ago for $7K, but couldn't justify it to myself.... that would have been awesome though.)

[Cha]

40. Kick for techies.. thank you steve.

[steve2470]

41. my pleasure, hope your day is great! nt

[BootinUp]

42. Until I see it with me own eyes its Vaporware

Sounds great, but their memristor technology has missed launch dates before.