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Grab A Piece Of Big Blue's Big Iron

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the this-one-goes-to-11 dept.

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?

7 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What about Window$? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5
    What will you need if you want to try Windows out? A Beowulf of Crays?

    No, just those sunglasses that block out harmful blue light..

  2. Re:Compaq do this too by HeUnique · · Score: 5

    No no, some people do miss a thing here..

    What IBM will give you is an ENTIRE VIRTUAL MACHINE! - not just a very limited user account - but a full Linux virtual machine - with /root /usr, 128MB RAM, disk space etc..

    On Compaq machine you just get an account - you cannot go to /usr/local and start installing/erasing stuff, you'll have to reconsider other users when you running you wild intense-use-of-processor app..

    --
    Hetz (Heunique)
  3. Games by Y2K+is+bogus · · Score: 5

    I can see it now, the ultimate platform for playing CoreWars.

    Better start writing your bots now!

  4. Re:free as in beer by robinjo · · Score: 5

    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.

  5. Compaq do this too by RussGarrett · · Score: 5

    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...

  6. Limited time? by aralin · · Score: 5
    Well, they write that they expect people to do some development on the mainframe under Linux. I don't know how other developers, but I am certainly not going to do some work, when I am sure that after x days I won't even have ability to use it.

    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.
  7. Missing the point.... by Gollo · · Score: 5

    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.