Seeking to build momentum behind the most ambitious project to emerge from its laboratories in a decade, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. today announced the formation of a user group for technologists, developers and industry experts interested in programming for what it calls the “Memory-Driven Computing environment.”

HPE said it will facilitate the group, providing training, resources and toolkits. In return, members are asked to share algorithms, applications, opinions and potential use cases with each other. “Our hope is that we can explore the vast potential of our new approach and where it will collectively take us,” wrote Mark Potter, senior vice president and chief technology officer of HPE’s Enterprise Group.

The company is hoping to strike while the iron is hot one month after demonstrating a prototype of The Machine that uses 160 terabytes of directly addressable main memory. This amount of memory makes it “simultaneously work with the data from 80,000 human genomes. The implications for every industry, from space travel to transportation to healthcare, are huge,” Potter wrote.

As proof, Potter cited a collaboration between HPE and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases that he said has already yielded nine-fold improvements in speed when processing massive data sets in the quest to find a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease. “We believe these gains could increase up to 100X when we expand our learnings to the other components of their pipeline,” he wrote.

HPE is also expanding its roadmap for The Machine to include categories based on outcomes such as performance, efficiency, resiliency and flexibility to dramatize the opportunities to apply the technology in other areas. Potter said more than 20 partners have contributed to the development of working prototypes for what he termed “the first fully-realized, genuinely novel computer architecture in decades.” Along the way, HPE has discovered areas in which innovation isn’t necessarily appropriate, such as using a modified version of Linux instead of writing a new operating system from scratch.

HPE has also resisted the temptation to keep the technology it’s developing close to the vest, contributing the research behind its memory fabric to the Gen-Z Consortium, an industry group that is attempting to create and commercialize a new data access technology.

Good news has been hard to come by lately for the enterprise giant, which saw revenues plunge 13 percent in its most recent fiscal quarter. HPE executives insist that the declines are natural consequence of shedding stagnant businesses and refocusing the company on data center infrastructure.

Although The Machine may have game-changing potential in the long term, it’s not expected to move the needle on earnings any time soon. “If the future comes to pass as HPE imagines, the company could be sitting pretty,” said Charles King, president and principal analyst at Pund-IT Inc., “but that’s a very big gamble to  base your future on.”

Image: Pixabay CC