Mainframe Programming to Make a Comeback?

ajw1976 writes to tell us that IBM has released a series of announcements today "introducing many new software tools, academic programs, and support for outside developers." The new releases are designed to help entice programmers and businesses back to the mainframe. From the article: "The announcements, according to analysts briefed on them in advance, signal a shift from defense to offense in the company's mainframe strategy. Last month, I.B.M. introduced a machine priced at $100,000, about half the previous starting price for its mainframes, which can run up to several million dollars. The announcement of the low-end mainframe was made in China, which I.B.M. regards as a promising market for the machines."

Comments

Cluster computing is better

[starfishsystems]

There is a strong movement toward cluster computing as a way of sharing the costs and benefits entailed by massive compute resources.

It turns out to be a lot like mainframe computing in terms of physical infrastructure and administration, and in fact often takes over disused mainframe computing centres, at least in the university space.

Unlike the mainframe environment, anyone with Unix/Linux experience is already equipped to take full advantage of cluster and grid computing. Either enviroment provides specialized resources that you have to learn how to access, but to me, the advantage goes to whichever environment provides the most universal expression of those resources, and is least likely to lock my efforts into one particular architecture.

A mainframe is an especially proprietary architecture. Portability has never been its strong point. Conversely, most cluster computations that I've seen have been quite trivially ported from one cluster environment to another. And to some degree it's in every vendor's interest to make it so.

The exceptions are interesting but, at this point, surprisingly rare. Relatively few researchers are decomposing problems in a way which requires either MPI or shared memory. Perhaps the field is not mature enough for that yet, much less for the sorts of computation envisioned by the Grid community, though that day will eventually arrive.

What I mean is, the biggest market for massive computation is always going to be driven by ordinary computation which happens to operate at a massive scale. And for that, the plainer, more symmetric, and more standardized the architecture, the better, because development and testing costs are not going to go down in the face of massive computing resources, they're going to go up.

The perfect mainframe, in other words, is one node in a Beowulf cluster. And that's fine. Just don't go running MQ Series on it, okay?