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Grab A Piece Of Big Blue's Big Iron
Alowishus writes: "IBM is going to make one of its high-end zServer mainframes available for free to the public for development and testing of Linux applications. It has 10 CPUs and 2.1TB of storage, and will offer TurboLinux or SuSE distributions set up as virtual servers. It's expected to support about 1,000 simultaneous users." However, hold your horses just a bit: Registration is not yet open, the accounts are good only for a limited time, and the site lists other conditions details, though none sound onerous. Among other things, "once a user is registered and approved to access a LCDS system, a user is required to have direct Internet connection, via a Telnet and SSH client." Though there have been other free sandbox accounts, having an account on an S/390 would be sweet, eh?
I think this is IBM's argument: Linux and Apache have become de facto multi-vendor marketplace standards. It's more effective to adopt and adapt this giant body of work than it is to bear all the costs of a specialized big-iron operating system and web server.
From the Free Software point of view: a quick empirical view of the world shows that corps and govs want big iron, and want some software to run on it. I believe that the world is a better place when all software is available under some kind of open license, not just the bitty box software that you care about. What if I wanna teach myself how big servers run 1000 separate system images? I start reading the arch/s390 directory in the linux kernel source. Or I read a book by a teacher who has access to arch/s390 source and can use that knowledge to teach me.
Computer programming is more than those 10-week class projects in undergrad school. We have millions of lines of "prior art". The GPL license and the BSD license are the most effective ways on the planet to make that prior art as accessible as the primary literature in disciplines like chemistry. That's important if big-iron programming is going to be an open competitive field, not limited to employee/serfs operating under NDA's. (Insert return-of-medieval-guilds rant here).
(Maybe you think the world would be a better place if nobody had a computer that big. I think that would be a Luddite opinion. The fact is, lots of organizations already do, and I'm happier if they are running Linux rather than a closed-source OS like AIX or Solaris).
No, just those sunglasses that block out harmful blue light..
No no, some people do miss a thing here..
/root /usr, 128MB RAM, disk space etc..
/usr/local and start installing/erasing stuff, you'll have to reconsider other users when you running you wild intense-use-of-processor app..
What IBM will give you is an ENTIRE VIRTUAL MACHINE! - not just a very limited user account - but a full Linux virtual machine - with
On Compaq machine you just get an account - you cannot go to
Hetz (Heunique)
I uploaded some homebrew benchmarking software to it. The memory bandwidth seems amazing. Compared to a reasonably high-end Intel server, it has about 10x the memory bandwidth. Either that, or lots and lots of L2 cache. But I'm sure I wasn't the only one on the system, and the tests consistently showed almost 10x the throughput of Intel.
The test was simple: take a range of memory of X megs, and write a random char to it. Time how many can be done in a quarter of a second, extrapolate MB/s from that. I get almost the same numbers if I use 10MB chunks as I do to 1MB chunks. Good shit here.
Single CPU performance isn't much different, but that wasn't the point. The systems could also be configured to give my account access to multiple processors.
If I started my own hosting company, I think I'd definitely use one of these babies.
I can see it now, the ultimate platform for playing CoreWars.
Better start writing your bots now!
Great! Let's all just shout foul to IBM. How dare they give access to a computer for free? Bad bad IBM! It should be GPL! No! They should also give free T-shirts!
SourceForge is a great contribution but don't use it to put down other gifts. That's greed.
But what might seem like a grand experiment is also a shrewd marketing move by IBM. None of IBM's server competitors--such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard or Compaq Computer--has offered similar programs.
ZDnet seem to be avoiding the fact that Compaq have their huge TestDrive program. They let anybody (currently)access:
Beowulf Cluster on AlphaServers
Caldera OpenLinux on ProLiants
Tru64 on various AlphaServers
TruCluster server on several AlphaServers
OpenVMS on AlphaServer
Debian on AlphaServer
Debian on ProLiant
FreeBSD on AlphaServer
FreeBSD on ProLiant
Kondara Linux 2000 on AlphaServer
Kondara Linux 2000 on ProLiant
Linux64 on Blazer Itanium
Mandrake on Proliant
NetBSD on on AlphaServer
RedHat on many ProLiants
RedHat on even more AlphaServers
SuSe on ProLiants
SuSo on AlphaServers
TurboLinux on ProLiant
Plus numerous databases...
Lots of toys... all for free...
I agree that the limited time is good for the 'testing' users who just want to know how it feels, but I doubt they will appeal to someone who would like to do a serious work with such conditions.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
What will you need if you want to try Windows out? A Beowulf of Crays?
I expect that the majority of work allowed by Big Blue will be architecture porting and testing (eg, x86 to S390), rather than development from scratch. There of course will be (I expect) some products that may wish to exploit the Linux-to-z/OS (the OS formerly known as OS/390, MVS, yadda-yadda) functionality that is soon to come (why go over the network from a logical Linux machine to a logical z/OS machine when you can go cross-memory?), and these will be developing some code from the gound up. But I can see that a lot of software currently running successfully on x86, PPC, etc (commercial or not) needs to be tested on 390 to officialy "support" it, and, let's face it, not many people have easy access to a 390 machine, let alone a 390 machine running Linux!
:-)
This is IBM's way of getting as much existing Linux software as possible to list 390 as a supported architecture. There's a lot of support-contract related money to be made by distributions in this areana....if a company has already shelled out on 390 hardware, they are hardly going to go without a software support contract for their Linux Distro.
Having said all that, I believe that the porting effort is negligable for most user-level applications, but of course, you would like someone to actually test their software on the architecture before assuring you it works there, wouldn't you?
Gollo.