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IBM Leaks Details on New Mainframe
Mark writes "Big Blue inadvertently revealed details about its new z10 Enterprise Class mainframe set to launch on Feb. 26, as well as details on z/OS v1.10, a new version of the mainframe OS due out in September. 'According to an internal IBM document obtained by SearchDataCenter.com, the z10 Enterprise Class will come in five different models and feature 64-way chips, compared with the 54-way z9 mainframes and earlier 32-way models. In a conference call last month, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge told investors that the z10 would have 50% more capacity, which indicates that it will probably tap out at around 27,000 million instructions per second (MIPS) at the top end, compared with about 18,000 MIPS on the previous z9 Enterprise Class.'"
Nah, just a bunch of dual core chips. Take a look at the IBM Journal of Research and Development which has a lot of nice detail. Look at Vol. 48, No. 3/4 and Vol. 51, No. 1/2.
The things they share are not visible to the user as they are hidden behind the instruction decoder. You can see some evidence of the fact that IBM are trying to lower costs by sharing a lot of the design between the two lines though from certain new additions to the POWER instruction set, such as hardware support for Binary Coded Decimals (useful in high-throughput financial systems and present in the mainframe line since the 1401 and 700-series, which preceded System/360).
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512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
They also support partitioning on the hardware level, so you can run z/OS or Linux virtual machines with almost no overhead (something you've been able to do since it was called System/370). You also have a huge amount more fault tolerance with a system like this (take a look at how many transistors on the CPUs are dedicated to error checking, and then start looking at the peripheral systems).
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Well, not enough coffe today, my bad. Megagrams, sure. However, the phrase "thousands of kilograms" actually IS used in speech instead of "tonnes" for some ranges, something like 1000-20000 kilograms, because it allows to express a precise, yet relatively significant mass in a more natural way when this precision matters (that is, most likely below 20t) - I'd rather say "eight thousand four hundred fifty-four kilograms" than "eight and four hundred fifty-four thousandths of a tonne".
As an added benefit, you avoid the question "which one, metric or imperial?" (no, I'm not going to try to determine the airspeed of an unladen metric tonne), which might come up as the spelling difference isn't significant enough in pronunciation.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
You don't get out much do you? Mainframes are going strong in data centers that need high availability, fault tolerant, error correcting, massively parallel systems. There is also a LOT of old code that is still going strong on them. Their inherent ability to run multiple virtualized OSes is another strong suit.
Your math is also way off if you think 4 x86 cores outperform this. I'll leave you to do the proper calculations as your homework.
I work currently in an organization that uses mainframes. They are the z9 series - and honestly are some of the most useful things.
We use them due to ability operate in something called a sysplex. A sysplex is when multiple mainframes share data (known as DASD) and work together. When a mainframe is in a sysplex, you can do all sorts of things to the machine without having to bring your application down. These range from whole operating system upgrades to hardware maintenance and the end user will never see the impact. A sysplex literally is designed to be a 24x7 operation.
You can buy other types of machines that will be more powerful, faster or do operation x better, but it is hard to find a set of machines that are as stable and reliable as a mainframe is (and process millions of transactions per second).
Also, in terms of virtualization - a single mainframe on z/Linux can host many virtual linux servers - enough that you can save a substantial amount on power costs (my org estimated 400k a year in savings in terms of power alone - if the linux servers that are hosted individually on one of our distributed networks went to virtual on a mainframe).
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
The name of the product is not as much the stumbling block as is the price. In fact, many (if not most) mainframes are not sold at all, but leased.
Breakfast served all day!
Well, you know what thought did. Linux is a 1st class OS on Z series hardware. Expect IBM to support it on this machine.
While the frontend may be rooted in the System/360 set, the driving force seems likely to be the same as all the Power6 systems. For example http://www.pseriestech.org/forum/articles/what-is-project-eclipz-112.html
Note the 'z' in eclipz. They seem to be seeking to consolidate their non-x86 offerings in terms of core component design.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's surprising that people are still using MIPS as a measurement! The (now very old) joke was that MIPS really stood for Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed, on account of the fact that it's highly dependant on how much you can actually do with each instruction, and also which instruction you are measuring. That dates back to the 80s at least, possibly the 70s, and it's why everyone should use representative benchmarks to compare CPUs rather than clock speeds and/or MIPS. The joke even made it into Linux, where the bootup BogoMIPS measurement is said to be "the number of million times per second a processor can do absolutely nothing."
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
an ABEND is an 'abnormal end' Which is mainframespeak for when something dies :)
Mainframes could share DASD *long* before the introduction of sysplex. Now - *parallel* sysplex, that's different - that's shared memory for things like DB2 lock structures, etc.
:)
I'm a mainframer from way back and I've got the grey hair to prove it.
"The bigger the lie, the more they believe." - Det. Bunk
Yes, it IS really that easy. The cooling lines are all quick disconnect and you literally shove a module ( about the size of a typical intel box ) into an empty bay, and the system will POST, recognize and begin assigning work to another 64 processors. I have seen it with my own eyes, and it is just insanely cool!
I know a lot of /.rs are to young to remember VM / PROFS and stuff like that. VM will let you run just about any operating system as a "Guest OS" and that is some cool shit.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Don't let the v1.10 fool you. z/OS v1.10 is a die hard direct distant descendant of the original OS/360 operating system that ran on the original System/360 back in the mid 1960's. OS/370 ran on the System/370 and OS/390 ran on the System/390, so IBM renamed the operating system z/OS for the z/Architecture machines.
--ThoraX695
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene is massively parallel. z series mainframes are not.
Not only just Linux builds, it is actually a supported commercial solution. :-)
Ezekiel 23:20
Clustered computers are still, and probably always will be, more cost effective than Mainframes. However some applications are more suited towards mainframes, HPC stuff, rather than cluster, HTC stuff.
You can't measure things in terms of "processing power".
Mainframes are almost like networks in a box. They're all about I/O bandwidth: moving large amounts of data from one place to another where useful work can be done on it. Individual CPUs don't have eyepopping performance because that's not how you increase the amount of work that gets done on a mainframe. You add more CPUs and attach them to the fat data pathways. If you have tasks like cryptography that might tie up CPUs, you offload it onto a co-processor. If you have tasks that require very fast individual computations rather than aggregate performance, you need a supercomputer, which is a different beast.
It's true you can design a microprocessor that looks pretty powerful compared to mainframe processors, but the trick is to find a way to keep it busy. If you are doing a non-I/O intensive task like doing an integer computation benchmark, of course it's going to look "more powerful". As soon as you do something that requires processing lots of data, then your microprocessor is spending the vast majority of its time twiddling its very muscular thumbs because you can't give it enough data to work on. Mainframes are designed so this doesn't happen.
Mainframes are not optimal for every kind of workload, but where moving data around is the bottleneck, you eventually either get a mainframe, or construct the equivalent of a mainframe yourself out of racks of servers, SAN, server virtualization and management software.
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