Slashdot Mirror

http://www-142.ibm.com/art/MailSidePreviewNoMiniview.jpg

The page you are referring to is showing the Notes client as it was over 10 years ago. The current version can be seen here: http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/lotus/lotusweb/product/nd8/demo/shell_popup.html/

And as you probably did not know - the IBM is bundling the OpenOffice applications with the current Notes version. AS can bee seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-qK34CzKjM/

MSProject - too low end.

Take a wee look at this fella: Rational Portfolio Manager.

Kicks lumps out of MSP.

(Yes, I work for IBM. No, I don't work for Rational. No, I'm not speaking for IBM. Yes I do use RPM on a daily basis)

I'm still waiting for SMIT to be ported.

The 2.0GHz Barcelona beats the 3.0GHz Xeon X5365 (Cloverton) on floating point. Barcelona specfp_rate2006 score is 73.0 to Cloverton's 66.9. Things can only get better as AMD cranks up the clock in the coming months.

If you scale the benchmarks to the same GHz rating you will see that clock for clock Barcelona is at worst on par with Intel's best chip, and at best 80% faster on floating point. This is really quite amazing when you consider it's using the same amount of power as the previous 2 core AMD Opteron.

Bell Labs doesn't really exist anymore because the visionary guys who ran the likes of Bell, HP, etc., have been replaced by corporate greedhead drones who diligently "enhance shareholder value"...

... by offshoring anything that isn't nailed down.

IBM has its own office package: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/sma rtsuite/
Is this another case of the one division not knowing what the other does, or is IBM giong to drop smartsuite?

Emphatic agreement on Ultra-Edit. I bet you can trim it from 10MB too - the executable is only 4M.

I regularly commune with the Big Iron all the time; it's the only editor I know that can FTP Open from an MVS host. I use this option at least once a day.

It also makes the EBCDIC-ASCII conversion a little saner than you get when you just FTP from an MVS host in ASCII format. If you bring the file over in binary and do a local conversion (which you can also do with Ultra-Edit) you don't have as many issues with spurious line breaks, etc.

One of the problems with supercomputers is that there aren't really very many of them, because of the size and cost. It means that the tools you use to run your supercomputing applications are similarly unusual. The skills to use and develop on parallel systems are then equally scarce. Access to a supercomputer isn't exactly common.

> I don't see any real advantage over "Model 2+" (Servlet/JSP pairs) that I started with in 2001.

Sounds like you want to take a look at IBM's Hamlets - a nice example of the "simplest solution possible".

IBM is a bad example for almost anything. I looked at your "JLINQ" thing - guess what: IBM already has this under another name. J2C. It's been out for 6 years.

c# is still in the doldrums for adoption. Unlike other posters that may claim something without data: Java is still the most widely used language with more than 7x the marketshare of C#.

5-12MHz 5-12MHz 16-bit (8086) June 1978 29 thousand

(from http://redhill.net.au/c/c-1.html

So, 29k transistors. Hmm. How many transistors does a wristwatch have? I'm guessing, for instance, that my P.O.S. Timex LCD critter can't have too much semiconductor complexity. OTOH, this prolly has scads and scads more transistor-y goodness.

"What is high availability to you?" That is the question HP posed in a Service Guard class I was in once. It's a valid question though. I work with mission critical hospital systems in health care and deal with high availability on a medical hosting service. This means in my particular environment, we need 24/7 operation with minimum or no downtime (
Linux HA Project
IBM HACMP (High Availability Clustered Multi-processing)
HP Service Guard for Linux (also available on HPUX)
Oracle RAC (Real Applications Cluster)

Those are some ares to start with. If you are doing Oracle, you can create a GRID compute environment which will allow for true clustering and load balancing with Oracle in a shared environment with SAN. Once thing to keep in mind is that a SAN is required for most clustering. RedHat also offers the GFS filesystem which is a true proven clusted filesystem. There is another called GPFS which has been used cross platform as well, but required licensing.

When it comes to redundant hardware for HA, make sure you support the minimum requirements for heartbeat paths depending on what clustering solution you want. If you use HACMP or Service Guard, you will likely use a SAN HB and at least 1 redundant network path. Also when using a SAN, use multiple HBAs to provide reduncancy with a multi-path software such as dm-multipath (Linux), Securepath (UNIX), HDLM (Unix), MPIO (IBM UNIX), SDD (IBM UNIX). There are plenty of documents on how to do HA under various environments. I recommend looking at some of the IBM redbooks on HACMP and on Clustering. They also have redbooks for Oracle tuning on Linux with POWER, which will give you an idea about how to do Linux Oracle clusters. If you can create a Oracle Metalink account, you can find out some of the tuning and detailed info about Oracle clusters.

I am sure there are others I am missing, but that covers the base for most clusters. The only other thing is finding a persistent messaging platform (like IBM Websphere MQ - MQ Series) to handle message passing in applications. IPC is good under UNIX for programming, but not as good with clusters, security, or transaction guarantees.

The only other thing to remember is cost. HA environments do incur costs higher than small unreliable environments. Things like mirrored drives, redundant HBAs, redundant power supplies and power feeds, redundant NICs, etc. People worry about petty things like how likely drives will fail, etc. If you architect your environment properly and build your clusters, you build around that. RAID 5 on your SAN, redundant cards, fault tolerant hardware, better reporting mechanisms (HP and IBM integrate daemons on all their OS's to report potential hardware failures with mid-range to high end servers). Look at what your SLA is and what you have provide and then look for the best, most reliable hardware and software to fit in your budget to provide that. Not everyone can buy millions in hardware and software to run a true mission critical environment.

I agree, memory allocation can be faster, and the VM can compile the code to use all available features on the target processor. I doubt that the compiler can perform as many and thorough optimizations as a static compiler though.

I'm sure that using different implementations would have given different results.

It's a common misunderstanding that garbage collection prevents memory leaks. It doesn't, it prevents use of dangling pointers. In C++ you can either create a memory leak (by not calling delete) or create a dangling pointer (by calling delete but leaving references to the deleted object). The former is always a bug, the latter only if you dereference the pointer (after which you usually crash or corrupt data). In Java, you can create a memory leak (by having references to unneeded objects in live objects), but you can't create a dangling pointer. You can accidentally use an object which is supposed to unneeded though (causing a violation of program invariants / contracts, without a crash but possibly corrupting data).

See e.g. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-l eaks/ for more information.

As discussed in the previous article in this series, JSON is a useful format for Ajax applications because it allows you to convert between JavaScript objects and string values quickly. In this final article of the series, you'll learn how to handle data sent to a server in the JSON format and how to reply to scripts using the same format.

As discussed in the previous article in this series, JSON is a useful format for Ajax applications because it allows you to convert between JavaScript objects and string values quickly. In this final article of the series, you'll learn how to handle data sent to a server in the JSON format and how to reply to scripts using the same format.

What this does bring up, though, is the unfilled need currently of having an auto-upgrader software package where new kernel packages can be auto-upgraded and then migrated too on the fly without requiring a reboot.

You mean something like Kexec?

HP intel/AMD hardware is always leaps and bounds ahead of IBM's x series hardware.

http://www.netbeans.org/products/cplusplus/

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/libra ry/os-ecc/

Actually, there is a backgammon AI that consistently beats human grandmasters. You're correct that it uses neural networks, and that the author, Gerald Tesauro, has done some pretty cool things, but you're under-representing its success. Without digging through my old IEEE paper stacks, the first thing I can find is from more than a decade ago when TD-Gammon was already playing grandmasters to a tie http://www.research.ibm.com/massive/tdl.html.

I also happen to thing backgammon is more interesting in chess because it isn't fully deterministic, which also explains why neural networks would meet with more success than a decision tree approach. Most of the AI involved in playing strong chess involves looking as many moves ahead as possible (I know there is more to it than just that, but thats the thrust of the technique), and of course as computers get faster you can look further ahead. Eventually you're able to look far enough ahead to see all possible outcomes of the game from any position. To me this barely qualifies as AI. That gives the computer more than just perfect information about the state of the game, it has perfect information about every state of every game. It is less a prediction than a simple A to B to C map of a win. Thats why games that are non-deterministic (like backgammon or any game with random dice rolls) or games where the players are given incomplete information (think poker or blackjack, few boardgames deal with incomplete information because it would require a neutral referee and probably be cumbersome and boring) are far more interesting for the field of AI.

I was under the impression that the rules allowed them to do that: http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c. 8.html "13. At any time during play, IBM may replace any or all of the computer hardware and/or software being used to play the games" But it's still kind of dirty..

Where is the software support, for one?

You guys keep waiting for MS to fuck up. Give me a reason to get rid of them first!

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/co ntinuous-data-protection/

Its great for laptops or remote machines that have transient network connectivity. Backs up (with sub file backup and versioning) transparently in the background and caches backups on local disk for when you are not connected to the network.

Works for CIFS, WebDAV and Tivoli Storage Manager backup destinations.

Give it a shot, the 30 day trial is fully functional.

I've been using it for a while now.
---
DISCLAIMER: I work for IBM / Tivoli.

This is for windows operating systems only. The name may sound ungainly, but the software (particularly the recent v3.1 refresh) works really well for this sort of use case. Pricing is approximately $50/license, available in 25-packs direct from IBM, or in smaller increments from a reseller. Very good value for money, and I say this as a satisfied customer.

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/co ntinuous-data-protection/

Backs up to network drives, WebDAV folders, or tivoli storage manager servers. The first two will be applicable to small businesses.

The software monitors the I/O drivers, and just copies changed blocks once an initial synch has been done. This ensures that only the changed data is pushed over what can be a preciously network link.

It can also simultaneously keep a copy of the protected data in another folder/directory, allowing for immediate restore should a file get corrupted. Very handy stuff.

The most challenging element with the setup then becomes getting a quiesced copy of the database files. This can probably be acheived by having the administrators write a small script to stop MSSQL, run a manual backup, then restart MSSQL. A bit annoying, but backing up MSSQL live is normally the realm of far more expensive software.

Disclaimer, I work for IBM.

The IBM System x3755 has offered this feature since it came out as well. Instead of the fourth processor card you install a pass through card and it turns it into a three way. We've done a few benchmarks (warning pdf) with the Pass Through card and what it could do between 3CPU and 4CPU operations.

pretty cool ability for a few things.

The imbedded link is broken. Try here instead: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l- linux-networking-stack/

It has not in 1973.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage /storage_3340.html

Yeah, I think you're a rude idiot. Here are other compatible and fully supported configurations from major vendors: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/492635- 0-0-0-121.html http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/re dp4269.html Please think and search before posting such drivel.

• Windows (IA32 and AMD64)
• Linux(IA32,AMD64,PowerPC 32/64)
• z/OS(31 and 64 bit-yup,not a typo, z/OS uses a 31 bit addressing scheme)
• AIX (PowerPC 32/64)
• z/Linux 31 and 64 (Linux on system z)
• See here for the early release program.

IBM has a free version of Java, I believe up to 5.0, for Linux on PPC. I have it running on an openSUSE PowerMac. I believe this is the site to look at. They don't say PPC, but you want the pSeries version (in both 32 and 64 bit varieties).

"AIX has a free download somewhere? Where??"

Read about it from IBM themeselves: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/218 54.wss

More info here http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=servers&article Id=9026901&taxonomyId=155&intsrc=kc_top

The AIX Beta program is now open to everyone, not just "by invitation."

The downlaod page is here: http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/sear ch.jsp?pn=AIX

AIX 6 Open Beta 6.0 Beta 09 Jul 2007 15.2MB AIX

AIX 6 is the next release of IBM's UNIX OS. This beta includes new capabilities for virtualization, security, availability and will run on IBM POWER4 and later systems.

There you go ...

"AIX has a free download somewhere? Where??"

Read about it from IBM themeselves: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/218 54.wss

More info here http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=servers&article Id=9026901&taxonomyId=155&intsrc=kc_top

The AIX Beta program is now open to everyone, not just "by invitation."

The downlaod page is here: http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/sear ch.jsp?pn=AIX

AIX 6 Open Beta 6.0 Beta 09 Jul 2007 15.2MB AIX

AIX 6 is the next release of IBM's UNIX OS. This beta includes new capabilities for virtualization, security, availability and will run on IBM POWER4 and later systems.

There you go ...

If it's going to be installed in 2011, it's probably anyone's guess.

Might also be a second-generation Roadrunner.

Got a good laugh about someone calling you on astroturfing, somehow I doubt Slashdot posts affect purchasing decisions on supercomputers all that much.

Seems a good bet it's a Blue Gene/P.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/217 91.wss

IBM Power5+ and later also had inter-core connections.
The Niagra line of processors is impressive, but you had to worry about workload AND what would happen in 18 months when the server was "reused" for some alternate need by folks that didn't know what floating point was?

I've tried to find a fit for the T1 servers in my work as a technical arch for the last year ... it always came down to the customer not wanting to risk it so a V490 at 4x the price would be used instead. http://store.sun.com/ Oh well. The IBM P5+ line was also used a bunch with great success - for home use, check out the P505Q http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/hardware/express_e ntry.html - for around $5k, you get a server equiv to a loaded V490 and you can run 40 OS instances of either AIX or Linux. That isn't a typo. Ok, 1 of those has to be AIX 5.3, but that hardly sucks. It's almost as nice as Solaris or Linux. Heck, at least it isn't HP-sUX!

I do about 25 projects a year - from start to finish, so I see a fair number of needs. The Niagra is an easy fit for a web farm. I just wish I had more of those projects that weren't wintel.

Anywhere you see mainframes and virtualization, you're talking about z/VM (http://www.vm.ibm.com/). Its been kicking around since the early 1970s (I remembered it from a mention in one of Tannenbaum's OS textbooks).

I'll bet you that there were a lot of happy people in Armonk the day they managed to get it running Linux (aka: new workloads).

"POSIX does not imply UNIX! It is an attempt to generalize the traditional UNIX API to match a variety of operating system designs. So, while POSIX implies a hierarchical file system, you might well be able to manage a reasonably conformant implementation on a system with no real top-level hierarchy."

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa -spec13/index.html

while on the subject of standards, see

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/iseries/v 5r3/index.jsp?topic=/nls/rbagslccollatecategory.ht m

specifically 'mon_thousands_sep'

and possibly, elect to take a vacation outside of north america.

just my 0,02 cents ..

Try looking at the following redbook: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247333 .pdf. It gives more technical details on the underlying hardware (see chapter 2).

Those of us who do software development for z/OS have access to some pretty impressive 'screamer' hardware.

There are a few reasons why the specs for mainframes are so hard to find.
One is that the things you find on IBM's website are designed for CEOs and CIOs who don't really care about technical details -- only "solutions"
The second is that the specs themselves aren't well-defined. As an earlier poster pointed out, you don't buy one of these things off the shelf. You tell IBM what you want to do with it, and you work with them to construct not just a mainframe, but all of the storage and other add-ons that come along.
And finally, the third reason is that the specs don't line up with anything you likely work with normally... (If they did, you'd know where to find them.)

Here are some specs for the z9 Enterprise Class:
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/z9ec/specification s.html

Simplified you are looking at 54 CPUs with 512GB of memory.
The CPUs themselves are basically Power6 processors, but thats really simplifying everything down.

Each CPU is actually a "book" of CPUs. Several run at once on the same data. If any disagree, the instruction is rerun on a different CPU. Entire backup books (in addition to the 54) kick-in if a problem is detected.

Additionally, the z/Series comes with a bunch of "Specialty" CPUs. You can get 27 CPUs that do nothing but process Java work natively. Or ones that handle DB2 workload. Or even special processors optimized for the linux kernel. Oh and don't forget the built-in hardware crypto CPUs.

Memory and I/O and Power and everything else works pretty much the same way on a mainframe. And all of it is hot-swapable. (Even the Emergency Power Off switch can be replaced while the system is running).

The hardware specs are impressive, but the biggest deal about these boxes is that they don't go down. Most people I talk to question the idea of consolidating servers into one box because of "single point of failure" concerns. This is where the mainframe shines. These things have MTBF of decades, and will just churn away forever.

But with the System z mainframe and Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex (http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/resiliency/gdps.h tml), you could have your hot backup site located something like 300 km away, with minimal data loss (e.g. in-flight transactions).

And I think your disaster recovery example is a bit far-fetched ... if a facility is damaged, work will be moved to the backup facility. Would anyone really try to sort through the rubble to see which servers could restart and then see whether what came up represented a coherent configuration that could actually perform useful work?

It's kinda hard to find technical specifications on these mainframes beyond marketing fluff.

Part of that is because IBM will customize the machines to your heart's content. The sky and your budget are the only limits. They leave a good many of the loadout details (xGB/TB of RAM, DASD storage size, # of CPUs per card, # of CPU cards, even number of mainframes - they can be chained in parallel). You should look at the Z series hardware specs for the general details and look up what details you don't know.

If you're looking for benchmarks or comparisons to x86/x86-64 or other commodity architectures good luck - they are nearly impossible to find. This is due to the implementations being on entirely different scales. The best comparison you an find is the MIPS per CPU. You can find some slightly stale numbers here (BTW: an LPAR is something that's been around on mainframes for several decades - one LPAR can run up to several hundred x86 VMs concurrently).

It's kinda hard to find technical specifications on these mainframes beyond marketing fluff. After some looking I found this brochure, which has some interesting information on the firmware and a few details of the I/O, but not much about the processing units, and why one of these would be able to replace 133 blade servers. It does mention up to 30 superscalar processors per box, but I'm not really sure what that means. (Maybe they go next to the inverting flux capacitor).

AIX 6 Open Beta - http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/aix/6/beta.html

Heh, you kids sure had it good. High tech for me was a BIC pen/spit ball shooter.

Daisy wheel? What's that?

LCDs??? Never heard of 'em

Love your site BTW...very inspirational.

The kernel rewrites can be a problem. I'm overdue to look through the IBM Linux Performance Tuning Redbook (July, 2007 version) again. Grovel through 168 pages of PDF. Compare to my current production kernels, compare to notes from the previous Redbook version, sort through my last round of production performance metrics. Test any changes, and fold into the configuration management system. Gack. The manhours do stack up, but luckily, I can do it in my copious free time.
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp428 5.pdf

I'm hoping that the LSB 3.0 will make life easier in future, regarding the ABI stability issue. They're claiming six years, going forward. But Sun have always done an excellent job there. Perhaps the best job amongst the commercial Unix vendors. They beat the stuffing out of HP-UX, but I've little experience with AIX, so I really can't claim they're best. But they're definitely someone to beat.
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Application_Com patibility

I don't know that I'd recommend switching any workloads to OpenSolaris if and when they release on GPL, as there are costs for hardware, support contracts, and staff to consider. So that would have to be determined on a client-by-client basis. But take a very serious look at it? Oh, yeah.

For those that are interested, you can read IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines, specifically the section On Your Own Time, as well as IBM's Blogging Policy and Guidelines and the Virtual World Guidelines.