Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) is hoping to speed up the development of a brand-new computer architecture called “The Machine” by inviting open-source developers to participate.

HPE made the announcement at this week’s Discover 2016 conference in Las Vegas, at the same time launching an open-source community page where developers can access the tools they need to begin contributing code for the Machine.

First announced back in 2014, HPE’s Machine is touted as having numerous radical innovations, with its core design focus being on memory rather than processors. The Machine will also use light instead of electricity to connect processing power and memory more efficiently, HPE said.

HPE believes the Machine will be better able to handle the massive amounts of data being generated by trends such as Big Data analytics, cloud computing and the Internet of Things. It reckons a new architecture is the best bet to address the computing demands of the future.

The Machine will be built on top of a number of new technologies, such as custom processors, silicon photonics and a new operating system. However, the biggest difference with today’s computers is the Machine’s focus on memory – HPE likes to call it “Memory-Driven Computing”. As such, a core component of the Machine will be HPE’s long-awaited and highly advanced memristor technology, which can be thought of as chips that can perform both memory and storage tasks on the computer. The technology can even keep data stored when the power is switched off, which will allow the Machine to offer vast pools of nonvolatile memory (NVM) for storing data. These pools will be connected via silicon photonics, which allows for data to be processed at a much faster rate, while reducing power consumption.

HPE says the Machine’s design is a fundamental change from a basic computer architecture that’s been in use for the last six decades. As such, it’s planning to invest “hundreds of millions” of dollars to build it.

HPE hopes to have its first prototype of the Machine ready by the end of this year, but it’ll be several more years before it becomes commercially available. But given how vastly different its architecture will be, HPE officials say they want to give developers a chance to start writing software for it. To that end HPE has created a new Machine community page on GitHub, and is inviting developers to get to work right away. For now there are four developer tools available, with the promise of more to come.

Those tools include a new database engine that can take advantage of numerous NVM and CPU cores to boost application performance, and also an NVM programming model that provides fault tolerance in the case of system crashes. HPE is also offering a “fabric attached memory emulation”, which is a development environment that allows developers to explore the Machine’s architecture. The last tool is a DRAM-based performance emulation platform that emulates the latency and bandwidth characteristics of future byte-addressable NVM technologies.

“By making software stacks for The Machine open source, we are enabling the developer community to gain early access to new programming methods and tools so they can improve upon existing applications and imagine future possibilities,” said Bdale Garbee, HPE Fellow in the Office of the CTO at Hewlett Packard Labs.

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