Linux's Open Mainframe Project Announces Areas of Focus (sdtimes.com)

New submitter mmoorebz writes: The Linux Foundation is announcing new areas of focus for its Open Mainframe Project. The Open Mainframe Project is a collaborative effort launched six months ago as a focal point for the deployment and use of the Linux OS on the mainframe.

Comments

Mainframe

[DrYak]

The smallest zMachine last time I checked was 16GB RAM and cost over $50k. You can get fucked with that pricing.

They are *mainframes* they are hardly comparable to desktop PCs.

They do not compete on total RAM or total CPU power. They compete on bus, interconnects, I/O bandwidth, I/O Coprocessors, etc.

In other words, its not the total number of GiB or FLOPS that make them expensive.
It's the fact that you can - e.g. - take thoese GiB and FLOPS, partition them into 200 instances, run 200x Linux installation on them, and each will be guaranteed access to at least 1/200th of the GiB and FLOPS with no overhead, despite the 199 instance running nearby.

Another way to put it: if you want to buld to the same specs out of commodity x86 hardware, it's also going to cost you around $50k not because of the RAM modules or the CPUs, but because of the highend Infiniband fabric that you'll need to put between your nodes to reach the same IO perfs.