[HN Gopher] IBM Z/OS v2.5, Next-Gen Operating System Designed fo...
___________________________________________________________________
IBM Z/OS v2.5, Next-Gen Operating System Designed for Hybrid Cloud
and AI
Author : rbanffy
Score : 97 points
Date : 2021-07-27 12:39 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsroom.ibm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsroom.ibm.com)
| vips7L wrote:
| What type of workloads are actually ran on mainframes? What do
| they do better than regular machines?
| enthd wrote:
| My first professional dev job was COBOL and it's associated
| tech, a majority of the stuff we did was banking stuff and at
| the time it seemed like that's what a majority of the COBOL
| market took up but I could be wrong
| bob33212 wrote:
| Some software was written for Mainframes that effectively NEVER
| reboots. So you have to modify it to support reboots easily,
| but it was written in COBOL or and old version of C and
| compiled with an old compiler. So it isn't that easy to fix.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Some software was written for Mainframes that effectively
| NEVER reboots. So you have to modify it to support reboots
| easily
|
| Run it in a VM instance that can be snapshotted/checkpointed,
| so that any reboot turns into "suspend and resume from
| checkpoint"? Or are there any pitfalls to just doing that?
| bob33212 wrote:
| Yes that can help, but VMs are still either Linux or OSX or
| Windows, and they all require security or other updates
| that will eventually need to reboot the system. Also the
| processors are different.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| It's really fun to recover a system that's designed to never
| go down. Some years ago I was working with Tandem/Compaq and
| they had a web server on the NonStop Himalaya platform. Long
| story short, said server had its first experience with real
| world web traffic at scale when we were delivering coverage
| of an international sporting event, and Things Went Poorly.
|
| The onsite Tandem engineers had never been faced with a
| NonStop setup that just...stopped (actually it was worse than
| that). Bear in mind this was the company that used to do
| demos by randomly unplugging hardware and the transactions
| kept chugging along. We ended up punting coverage to a
| smaller flat version of the site served off Compaqs running
| IIS while we cleaned up the mess.
|
| Now, Tandem shouldn't feel bad. After all, Cisco had guys in
| the hosting facility trying to keep the then-new PIX series
| up and running.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > It's really fun to recover a system that's designed to
| never go down
|
| The thing with systems designed to never go down is that
| you still need to be sure the recovery process works well.
| Never going down is just half if your nines.
|
| > served off Compaqs running IIS
|
| Yikes!
| tyingq wrote:
| For z/OS, I don't think much anymore. The high level of single-
| machine redundancy and architecture of I/O offload USED to be
| better than commodity machines. That's been eclipsed by raw
| power and improved distributed functionality in the commodity
| world.
|
| There are still companies (Visa, Airlines, GDS) having issues
| getting off the more unique TPF operating system. It's
| basically a distributed K/V data store that scales very well
| and deals well with write contention. So far, only Amadeus has
| been able to migrate off of it. Some smaller airlines were able
| to migrate away, but not the larger ones.
|
| The company that Google bought (ITA), was on their way to
| writing a full reservations system. They had finished the
| shopping engine but not the whole system. That was a company
| chock full of money of talent, and they didn't finish. Though
| their shopping engine is the best one that exists.
|
| Edit: Somewhat related point. The "developer efficiency" was
| quite good in these environments. Since the OS came with
| everything a developer needed, there was mostly only one right
| way to do everything. The languages, libraries, database, batch
| management, "UI", authentication/authorization, security, and
| so on, was already decided for you.
| [deleted]
| ryanianian wrote:
| Think: opposite of general-purpose operating systems use-cases.
| Very IO/compute/latency-intensive things. Where the whole
| programming paradigms are designed around efficient (even real-
| time) compute. Where the software+hardware pair are written
| once and rarely if ever changed, restarted, or taken down for
| maintenance. Credit card transaction processing and airline
| reservation systems for example.
|
| Of course you could use Linux or similar for such jobs, but
| highly specialized hardware+software pairings can eke out
| surprising performance at the cost of massive hardware and
| software-engineering bills.
| [deleted]
| derwiki wrote:
| A little off topic, but do new megacorps pony up for IBM? Or is
| it just the Verizons, Morgan Stanleys, etc who got locked in a
| while back and there's no easy course forward. Or maybe said
| another way, I've got $CASHCOW unicorn that raised a mega series
| H---why would I switch from the stack that got me there to z/OS?
|
| (disclaimer: I still claim to be scarred from being a former
| IBMer)
| danpalmer wrote:
| My understanding is that the tech unicorns do not, but that
| there are some off-the-shelf applications (in e.g. banking)
| that run on mainframes that do lead less tech focused companies
| to get into the mainframe game.
| zonethundery wrote:
| This is true of most core loan servicing and deposit
| management platforms. It is very difficult to get mortgage
| servicing (in particular) right; the mainframe platforms have
| decades of honing.
| dstroot wrote:
| In my experience a new unicorn will never architect anything
| the requires a mainframe. It is the older banks and insurance
| companies that have workloads designed specifically for
| mainframes that have 30-40 years of development and maintenance
| baked into them.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| >the older banks and insurance companies
|
| Also: telcos, hospitals, airlines, and state/federal
| government agencies.
| criddell wrote:
| What's the difference between a mainframe and a server these
| days?
| 656565656565 wrote:
| I wonder how many CPU cycles we burn running the many
| layers of abstraction we have built in the distributed
| computing world.. does this performance penalty exist in
| the mainframe world
| rbanffy wrote:
| A lot of it is running on dedicated hardware - some used
| to be dedicated silicon, but, IIRC, a lot of
| functionality is being brought into the CP (the "normal"
| CPUs), that when tasked with support functions, get
| custom microcode for that. Not even booting up these
| beasts is a simple thing.
| 656565656565 wrote:
| This architecture; CPs, ZAAPs, IFLs, IOs etc are
| compelling to me along with the minimal OS, DB layers
| with a development setup that feels only just capable,
| albeit at a cost to the development effort. It feels
| efficient from a compute perspective? Today in
| distributed land we have libraries built on libraries
| built on OS services and API layers with other stuff we
| don't need all to do some basic date math for example,
| how many cycles did we use to do that, maybe it was
| easier during the one off development process, was it
| worth it.
| throwawayForMe2 wrote:
| Things like Hipersockets and Java Zaap processors can
| help collapse layers.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Cost effective six 9 reliability transaction processing in
| small footprint.
| sgeisler wrote:
| I read that all mainframe components, even CPUs, were
| redundant and hot-swappable and that instructions are
| executed on two separate CPUs to detect faults and correct
| them on the fly. That would make a lot of sense if your
| application requires high availability and assurance but
| isn't designed for it. I haven't heard of any standard
| server hardware that can give you HA or such assurance with
| a single machine, probably because you would not build any
| application dependent on that these days. It's probably
| cheaper to do in software.
| travem wrote:
| Case in point, vSphere Fault Tolerance is a software
| approach that runs your workload in a VM where the CPU
| instructions are mirrored to another VM on another
| physical server to deliver redundancy against physical
| server loss.
| ideonode wrote:
| I remember hearing a story (probably apocryphal) about a
| mainframe that was so redundant that it had to be
| physically dismantled and moved from one datacentre to
| another across town, and did so whilst remaining up the
| entire time.
| tyingq wrote:
| "Mainframe" usually meaning you have legacy code that
| requires something that only runs in that environment. Like
| the TPF OS that Visa, Sabre, and many airlines use. Or z/OS
| things like CICS, Adabas, IDMS, IMS, VSAM, JCL, heavily
| mainframe flavored COBOL, 360 Assembler, etc.
|
| That is, the only driving requirement left for IBM
| mainframes is your own software that depends on system
| software that only exists on IBM mainframes.
|
| Same reason some people still use other old environments
| like HP MPE, IBM AS/400, and Tandem Nonstop, and so on.
| They have found, thus far, that the cost of doing that is
| less than the cost of rewriting it. Or they have been
| unable to do that for reasons other than cost.
|
| Edit: Separately, there are still some technical
| advantages. z/OS mainframes have a level of "within the
| rack" redundancy that you won't find in commodity servers.
| Or, with TPF, it's difficult to engineer a solution that
| scales as well and remains reliable...it's a very battle
| tested distributed K/V store that deals with heavy write
| contention.
| criddell wrote:
| It's all software and not hardware?
| tyingq wrote:
| The redundancy part of mainframes is hardware. You can
| live swap a CPU, for example.
|
| That's an aside though. The reason people keep buying
| them is software lock in, yes. There's a reason Amazon
| likes to push their proprietary services...they are the
| new mainframe.
| mimixco wrote:
| IBM has amazing support software for mainframes. Their
| fix tool, for example (SMTP/E) makes individual tapes for
| each customer to ensure that fixes go on correctly. All
| the dependencies are resolved for that individual
| customer _by IBM_ before the tape ships. That 's one-on-
| one service that makes sure your machine doesn't go down
| from a patch.
|
| In a high availability environment (like banking or
| airline reservations, as mentioned), mainframes never go
| off, even during upgrades. When physical machines need
| replacement, the entire system is run in parallel on a
| second machine.
|
| These boxes have both incredible I/O hardware (there's
| never been anything like IBM channel I/O) and the
| software to keep everything humming. On a typical day
| when I worked there, we'd have a 1,000 devs using the
| same box (and that was a small installation) with
| multiple operating systems, virtualizations, etc. with
| zero hiccups.
|
| IBM also has amazing software for getting stuff done.
| Documentation, for example, is universal and available
| worldwide from any terminal. When you want a printed
| manual, the system figures out which big, fast printer is
| near you and offers to print it down the hall. Every IBM
| employee has access to all the company's resources from
| every terminal, and it all just works.
|
| Yes, PCs have caught up to emulating many of these
| features, but they definitely don't have the robustness
| or ease of use that System/370 (z/OS) did.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Really hard to replicate Tandem Nonstop's feature set if
| that was what you actually needed.
|
| Of course part of the reason it faded away (indeed, was
| gradually fading away even when I worked for Tandem) is
| that almost nobody does need that sort of reslience.
| watersb wrote:
| Loma Prieta Earthquake, day 2.
|
| Bank calls the Tandem support line: "Our computer is
| down. It crashed! How do we get it back up?"
|
| It wasn't offline. It had fallen over, punching through
| some of the sections of the raised floor.
| dhosek wrote:
| 360 Assembler was the second (and last) assembly I
| learned (after 65021). Gotta love an architecture that
| requires you to maintain your own call stack for
| subroutines. Or that has CPU-level instructions to move
| integers to and from EBCDIC strings.
|
| --- 1. Well, I guess second-and-a-half. I played a little
| with Z-80 on my Spectravideo computer, but mostly that
| was writing a disassembler in MSX basic to reverse-
| engineer how the system worked after it was abandoned by
| its manufacturer. The disassembler was never finished
| because I didn't properly manage the multibyte opcodes.
| chr15p wrote:
| mainframes have hardware designed for very high IO speeds,
| they have no real advantage in cpu speed, but they can keep
| it fed with data far better than x86 servers which is what
| you want if you are reading millions of records off disk
| doing some fairly trivial calculations like adding interest
| and writing them back.
|
| These days if you can parallelise those calculations the
| price benefits of servers are worth the software
| complexity.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > they have no real advantage in cpu speed
|
| A Z15 core runs at 5.2 GHz (IIRC) and has shared access
| to 960 MB of L4 cache for every group of 4 sockets of 10
| cores each (Linux workloads can do SMT2 on each core).
| They emphasize single-thread speed because they measured
| diminishing returns when adding more cores to an LPAR and
| figured out it was pointless to play a numbers game.
|
| > These days if you can parallelise those calculations
|
| Yes, but it's not all workloads that are amenable to that
| - some will want to keep a consistent in-memory
| representation of the working data with all cores working
| on the same data. If you can scale out, great. If you
| can't, this is the very top of the line. It you need to
| scale up from a z15, I suggest you wait for the z16
| availability ;-)
| Bayart wrote:
| How much you can charge for it.
| protomyth wrote:
| We bought a new iSeries to replace our > 10 year old iSeries.
| It does the accounting and we expect it to last another 10+
| years. The backups are easy and the service is quick. The
| accountants did not want to consider another solution.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The iSeries is a fascinating machine. It was, when
| introduced, years ahead of anything else - virtual ISA,
| single-level storage and OS-level integrated DB/2 RDBMS -
| and, in many aspects, it still is (Apple's Newton is the only
| other platform I remember that has single-level storage).
| marktangotango wrote:
| Can anyone comment on the state of "re-hosting" solutions out
| there now? Seems like anyone who could, would be using one of
| those to get rid of the mainframe and run their code on commodity
| hardware.
| fanatic2pope wrote:
| I've been hearing variations of this argument for about 30
| years now.
| hughrr wrote:
| Nah they immediately freed themselves from the shackles of the
| mainframe and woke up the next morning in bed with Bezos
| grinning at them.
| unixhero wrote:
| Welp, AWS certainly delivers and kicks ass. Jeff over Big
| Blue any day.
| ksec wrote:
| _" IBM hasn't dominated the tech industry since the early 1980s.
| Most founders today weren't even born when the last antitrust
| case was opened into it. The share price is up 9x since then, and
| IBM shipped its highest-ever volume of mainframe computing
| capacity in.... 2020!"_[1]
|
| Never played around with one. But it must be working so reliably
| well in some specific field ( I am guessing Accounting and
| Finance ) that those end users, not engineers or IT, but actual
| people using the system dont want it to be replaced, only
| upgraded.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1408469812318195716
| jhickok wrote:
| DoD and related govt orgs keep it afloat as well. Maybe not the
| most powerful anymore, but rock solid support and longevity--
| their uptime is legendary-- keeps it going in little tech
| tidepools around the country.
| tims33 wrote:
| I don't understand why IBM doesn't just pare all of their assets
| back to mainframe and just own who they are. They are or already
| have ruined Red Hat and have a worst in class professional
| services business. They're good at the mainframe and should just
| keep updating it and following it up w/their weird marketing.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I imagine answer is revenue - how much of it is from Mainframe
| as opposed to everything else?
|
| I suppose divestiture of GTS is attempt to do that kind of
| slimming.
|
| Disclosure - I'm an IBM employee, but always on external gigs
| so have zero knowledge of direction or internal matters other
| than what I read here and on The Register... all opinions my
| own etc :)
| tims33 wrote:
| There is a chance that selling those divisions might yield
| better return in a sale. I think you're right on GTS.
| queuebert wrote:
| I'm still sad they got out of the PC game. Nothing will ever
| top the PS/2.
| tims33 wrote:
| Old tech companies that exit their engineering roots to
| become marketing and sales companies are a sad sight.
| unixhero wrote:
| Do you mean the x86 PS/2? It was not a very easy system to
| work with, compared with clones.
| queuebert wrote:
| I'm mainly talking about the hardware. The mouse had actual
| bearings in it instead of just a plastic wheel. The quality
| of the build was insane. Imagine a world where you have
| that build quality coupled to the right to repair and
| highly modular design.
| icedchai wrote:
| Back in the late 80's / early 90's, my dad's business had
| a few PS/2 machines, in addition to several Dells and
| Compaqs. The PS/2s were low end models, like the 30 and
| 25, mainly used for printing up packing lists, but the
| build quality was very high. Even the keyboards were
| solid.
| queuebert wrote:
| I think they sold the rights to Unicomp, who still make
| repro clicky keyboards like that.
| monocasa wrote:
| Not just the rights, but the factory itself too if memory
| serves right.
| paunchy wrote:
| The industrial design of those systems was nice but the Micro
| Channel architecture bus was an abject failure that never got
| traction.
|
| There are better examples of great IBM PC products, like the
| ThinkPad.
| queuebert wrote:
| The nipple mouse? You can't be serious.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Are you kidding? It was like telepathy. You touch it and
| it guesses where you want the pointer to be.
| naikrovek wrote:
| agree. all trackpads pale in comparison. all of them.
| hereforphone wrote:
| They should have called it OS/3
| rbanffy wrote:
| I know you are joking, but, since z/OS is the direct descendant
| of MVS (which stands for Multiple Virtual Storage) and predates
| DOS, the PC, the 8086 and most other things, it'd have been
| wiser to rename the PC and it's OS as SPS, or Single Precarious
| Storage. Abort, Retry, Fail?
| gumby wrote:
| Come on, IBM: an OS tuned for AI and Cloud but not Blockchain,
| Diversity, or Sustainability? You're leaving money on the table!
| rafaelturk wrote:
| Any OS should be just tuned for performance
| tester34 wrote:
| weird way to spell security
|
| who needs performance, current hardware is too fast for non-
| server meanwhile cruds can be optimized anyway
| merhard wrote:
| No, you're wrong. An OS that is just tuned for performance
| cant devops the blockchain like IBM's AI can using serverless
| IOT devices.
| jen20 wrote:
| Absolutely not. Mobile operating systems (including those for
| laptops) should be tuned for maximising battery life.
|
| Or provide profiles for different power situations.
| wolf550e wrote:
| High performance unauthenticated remote code execution
| newsclues wrote:
| Stability and reliability are also nice.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Arguably, performance v. efficiency is a fair decision. In
| most cases it means the same thing but in a few cases it
| really doesn't.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Right. This way the ransomware can encrypt the hard disk
| really quickly. And decrypt when you pay the ransom. ;-)
|
| Security, folks. A fast car without seatbelts is a death
| trap, not a means of transportation.
| queuebert wrote:
| I don't know about you, but I'm rarely annoyed that my server
| isn't 5% faster. But I'm always annoyed when it goes down.
| hughrr wrote:
| I came here after reading the headline hoping for the replies
| they invited and was not disappointed. Thank you.
| gumby wrote:
| :Person with Folded Hands: Please don't forget to follow me
| on instagram, fund my patreon, subscribe to my channel, tweet
| my comment and perform any other necessary hipster rituals!
| bluedino wrote:
| That makes me realize I haven't had a sales call from IBM
| regarding "Watson" for a while now
| leokennis wrote:
| We use some risk tracking web platform from IBM at my job.
|
| I'm not it's most proficient user but from the stuff I do in
| it, it's basically half CMS half relational database with
| some search and export functions.
|
| It's called "IBM OpenPages with Watson" because of:
|
| "Translate documents across 50+ languages, obtain 24/7
| support with a GRC virtual assistant, promote accuracy and
| efficiency in incident reporting with AI relevant
| classifications."
|
| So apparently "Watson" now means "translating and auto
| filling stuff"?
| gumby wrote:
| It's IBM's homeopathic AI.
| diegocg wrote:
| Even IBM had to give up the blockchain hype
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-blockchain-shell-former-s...
| imglorp wrote:
| They replaced it with the next buzzword overpack: "Quantum
| Machine Learning". I shit you not.
|
| https://research.ibm.com/blog/qiskit-summer-school-
| machine-l...
| zzok22 wrote:
| Quantum Machine Learning is a novel field. Early but very
| real
| rbanffy wrote:
| IIRC, Google was trying to use their DWave machines for
| optimization problems that look a lot like ML.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| only because BTC prices once again went vertical. If/when BTC
| crashes again, the vendors will be back on the blocktrain.
| RobLach wrote:
| What kind of applications of blockchains are there that a
| databased ledger wouldn't work for in a mainframe oriented
| system?
|
| You already have access controls restricting to trusted
| parties. Slapping a blockchain on top would just be adding
| complexity and overhead at this stage.
| jhgb wrote:
| I'd say that z/OS is already tuned for sustainability. You can
| run very old software on it.
| bob33212 wrote:
| Yes part of our accounting system is still running on Cobol
| from 1982, but don't worry it has been upgraded to the AI Cloud
| and it only costs 200M a year to keep running.
| kotaKat wrote:
| ... with still no way for anyone to (reasonably) learn outside of
| the Master the Mainframe learning system or cranking out
| thousands for z/PDT.
| rbanffy wrote:
| One of my biggest complaints about the Master The Mainframe
| thing is that they give you an up and running machine. There
| are very few ways to onboard from the very basics. You don't
| learn (at least I didn't got that far) to install software and
| services.
|
| I know you buy it fully configured according to what you
| ordered (every unit is custom-built, the ultimate luxury
| computer - take that, Apple) but, still, most people will have
| no idea what to even ask for or what the possibilities are.
|
| Having a hobby license for z/PDT or z/OS would be awesome, but
| I don't think it's coming. IBM got mad when the Hercules crowd
| started selling Hercules as sort of an off-ramp for mainframe
| users.
| natas wrote:
| good but can it run crysis?
| Amin699 wrote:
| As clients accelerate their journey to hybrid cloud, having a
| secured, scalable environment is critical for the underlying
| transformation process. IBM z/OS V2.5 introduces new capabilities
| that support application modernization and provide a cloud native
| experience on z/OS:
| markstos wrote:
| Nothing says "Modern Operating System" like "New Java/COBOL
| Interoperability".
| dstroot wrote:
| Anyone else having the site crash on iOS Safari?
| rwmj wrote:
| My z/OS browser displays it fine.
| rbanffy wrote:
| You laugh, but z/OS is POSIX compliant. You probably could
| (not saying you should) have a browser compiled for it.
| trasz wrote:
| Isn't it compliant the same way VMS was, simply because
| POSIX considers fundamental Unix mechanisms, like fork(2),
| optional?
| riffraff wrote:
| Other than the obvious buzzword compliance does anyone know what
| this actually means?
|
| > With z/OS V2.5, IBM is introducing new high performance AI
| capabilities that are tightly integrated with z/OS workloads,
| designed to give clients business insights for more informed
| decision making.
| jareds wrote:
| Maybe there's going to be new AI specific hardware on new
| Mainframe processors or AI accelerators in the future that will
| require z/OS 2.5 to run but they are not ready to announce the
| hardware? I think buzzwords is more likely though.
| skissane wrote:
| Here is a good high level slide deck on z/OS 2.5 new features:
| https://github.com/IBM/IBM-Z-zOS/blob/main/zOS-Education/zOS...
|
| It starts out with the marketing buzzwords but then drills down
| into the technical nitty-gritty. In terms of what the "AI"
| stuff actually means, one answer is contained on slide 121 -
| support for running Tensorflow and ONNX inside a Linux Docker
| container using zCX (which lets you run z/Linux Docker
| containers under z/OS). The zCX SIMD support referenced on
| slide 102 is probably highly relevant to this.
| gonzus wrote:
| "one answer is contained on slide 121" => right there, I
| decided not to open the slide deck.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| You have to go through 100 slides before getting to technical
| details?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| You have to go through 100 slides before getting to
| technical details _for this narrow specific particular
| topic that is being discussed here_
|
| A new OS is a significant endevour and there is a lot of
| release notes on any and all topics - technical, usability,
| timelines, compatibility, hardware, architecture, support,
| upgrade methodology, etc.
| jacquesm wrote:
| How does that compare dollar-for-dollar to running Tensorflow
| on a dedicated Linux cluster with GPUs?
| hvs wrote:
| Probably much more expensive.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Mainframes also have a lot of PCIe channels you can attach
| GPUs to. IO capacity and hardware offloading has always
| been the most notable difference between a mainframe and an
| x86 box.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if, with some clever programming,
| one could pipe data from disk directly to GPUs and back to
| disk without involving the CPUs that run user programs
| except for the thinnest slice of time.
| monocasa wrote:
| Do the specific Nvidia cards you'd ideally want for ML
| have s390x drivers?
| rbanffy wrote:
| That's something you'll need to ask Nvidia.
|
| But, considering what you paid for the mainframe, you
| probably have the budget to commission them to write
| drivers just for you (or to license their source and
| compile it yourself).
| Lammy wrote:
| (or to serve them a National Security Letter that says
| "give us your source" and compile it yourself)
| pjmorris wrote:
| Probably depends on whether you've already got the
| mainframe or not, and whether you've got the dedicated
| Linux cluster or or not.
| raesene9 wrote:
| If running containers on Mainframes is of interest, attending
| this talk at Defcon might be illuminating https://defcon.org/
| html/defcon-29/dc-29-speakers.html#coldwa... :)
| mhh__ wrote:
| I think they have been making a push on this front with POWER
| so maybe this is leading up to a similar hardware push for z
| systems. Still guessing buzzwords
| tyingq wrote:
| Yeah, that's irritating. I do recognize that mainframes had
| many of the things, forever, that are buzzwords now.
|
| But trying to tie an extremely compute intensive requirement
| (AI) to an environment with probably the highest $$/MIPS is
| just...dumb.
| tibbetts wrote:
| If you're doing transaction processing on the mainframe I
| could imagine wanting to score something (eg fraud) mid
| transaction, which might call for some additional platform
| capabilities. But it's also plausible someone in marketing
| demanded more AI.
| tyingq wrote:
| I can see that, but mainframes are perfectly capable of
| calling out to external services, and that's not new. I
| guess I really don't know what they are saying in regards
| to AI and mainframes.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| AI inference on existing model instances need not be very
| compute-intensive at all. The "training" (i.e. model fitting)
| phase is what requires a lot of compute resources.
| tyingq wrote:
| They are talking about customers spinning up Linux
| instances on their existing (mostly not Linux) mainframes,
| and special software to allow SIMD calls from Tensorflow to
| work, etc. I think that making a remote call out to a
| commodity box is probably easier in most cases.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I do not know if IBM will do this with the AI work.
|
| but in many other similar circumstances they give the option
| of buying Application Assist Processors. That takes the work
| away from the main processor.
|
| It is possible that IBM will offer some custom zAAP optimized
| for running the AI workloads.
|
| IBM also open up running AI in their cloud.
| skissane wrote:
| > but in many other similar circumstances they give the
| option of buying Application Assist Processors. That takes
| the work away from the main processor.
|
| zAAPs, zIIPs and IFLs are exactly the same hardware as main
| processors. The difference between them is purely at the
| licensing level. The firmware sets a flag saying "don't run
| classic z/OS workloads". z/OS sees that flag set and then
| will only schedule "new" workloads (such as Java and XML)
| to that processor. Actually there is an undocumented API
| you can use to schedule _any_ (enclave SRB mode) workload
| to the zAAP - IBM keeps it under NDA, and ISVs have to
| agree to obey IBM 's rules about what workloads are allowed
| to run as part of that NDA. (One ISV, Neon, started selling
| a tool to run an arbitrary workload on the zAAP, called
| zPrime, IBM immediately sued them, and Neon settled the
| lawsuit in 2011 and agreed to drop the tool). Other
| operating systems, such as z/Linux, ignore that flag
| completely and to them a zAAP is just the same as a normal
| main processor (CP).
|
| > It is possible that IBM will offer some custom zAAP
| optimized for running the AI workloads.
|
| Yes but that wouldn't be a _zAAP_. They do have hardware
| accelerators for various functions (crypto, compression,
| sorting) but those aren 't zAAPs (or zIIPs or IFLs). Crypto
| acceleration is CPACF (extra CPU instructions on main CPUs)
| and Crypto Express (external accelerator card). Compression
| hardware acceleration is zEDC. Sorting hardware
| acceleration is the Integrated Accelerator for Z Sort.
| sennight wrote:
| If this was the old IBM, back when they had an internal science
| journal just to keep track of their own accomplishments, I'd
| say they came up with something like z/TPF[0] - but for AI. But
| I would be extremely surprised if the new IBM actually started
| pushing the envelope of computer science again. Not until they
| reverse course on the whole "Lets get rid of all our hardware
| expertise and just focus on software" thing.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facilit...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| IBM is still making deeply custom chips for the z-series
| mainframes, running them at a higher clock rate than anybody
| else, and applying water cooling at the system level. Also
| they have a bus that intermediates between the CPU and RAM,
| someday the rest of the industry will catch up
|
| https://www.computeexpresslink.org/
| erk__ wrote:
| There is also stuff like a sorting co-processor which I
| find interesting https://blog.share.org/Technology-
| Article/peeking-under-the-...
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I'd love to do mainframe development. Sounds like it would
| be fun. I could never afford one though and my industry
| doesn't use them either. Uptimes of decades is seriously
| impressive.
| mimixco wrote:
| I used to fix compilers for IBM and we worked on (older
| versions of) these machines. They were awesome! Coming to
| the PC business after using mainframes was a sad joke.
| You should see what it's like working with VM, IBM's
| virtualization environment. It was amazing and that was
| 25 years ago.
| pm90 wrote:
| It's interesting that IBM wasn't sooner to the cloud with
| superior virtualization technology.
| mimixco wrote:
| Just like the PC, they didn't realize it was important
| until it was too late. In my experience, mainframes are a
| superior way to develop and run _every_ kind of software.
| The PC is a crippled, stupid stepchild by any reasonable
| comparison. Just the idea that you need to setup and
| manage 1,000 of them to come close to a small mainframe
| is ludicrous. Who needs the overhead and maintenance?
| Sure, you can swap machines and distribute loads between
| them, _but who wants to?_ Yuck. It 's a lot nicer to have
| that stuff handled automatically.
|
| Also like the PC, IBM didn't realize that their boxes
| could be used for this new funky thing called the
| internet. Talk about blind-sighted. Their first web
| product was an abomination they inherited from their
| purchase of Lotus. It didn't work and produced unusable
| websites, boding poorly for IBM's entry into that market
| which was already taking off with Active Server Pages and
| XMLHTTP.
|
| If IBM had loudly (and correctly) proclaimed that
| mainframes were _the_ place to run web services, everyone
| and their mother would be running mainframes right now
| instead of Linux boxes. IBM 's eventual realization of
| this led to their purchase of Red Hat!
| azinman2 wrote:
| Well, not just mainframes generally, but if they created
| AWS on mainframes and hosted them... that would have made
| it accessible for startups.
| mimixco wrote:
| It was so simple internally, they could have ported those
| tools to a GUI. But GUI's and user interfaces are not
| something IBM has ever done well (other than command line
| ones).
| azinman2 wrote:
| I would argue neither has AWS yet...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > If IBM had loudly (and correctly) proclaimed that
| mainframes were the place to run web services, everyone
| and their mother would be running mainframes right now
| instead of Linux boxes.
|
| No, they wouldn't. I could take _one_ Linux box, get a
| domain name, and have a web server. I wouldn 't be able
| to afford a mainframe, though. And if your alternative is
| renting a fraction of a mainframe, the answer is no. No,
| I will not trade a Linux box that I control for renting a
| piece of a mainframe that I don't control. Just no.
| mimixco wrote:
| For enterprise is what I meant. Not for individuals.
| mimixco wrote:
| Sidenote: In VM, you could spawn a new machines with
| "physical" storage or drives (Nothing was physical on the
| mainframe; everything is faked just for you! Awesome.) by
| typing a single command at the command prompt! If you
| needed to fix a bug in some combination of operating
| system and IBM products, you could spawn that exact
| customer-replicating environment in about 2 lines of
| text.
|
| Try that with Kubernetes!
| anthk wrote:
| LPAR makes LVM a joke.
| mimixco wrote:
| It's sad to read about the dev headaches caused by
| today's poor virtualization environments. I distinctly
| remember that stuff was _no work at all_ at IBM. It didn
| 't interfere one bit with the actual work of coding on
| the products. In fact, we really never thought about
| setups or creating environments for testing or
| development.
|
| In peer reviews, for example, it was standard to bring
| output from both the failing case and the working case as
| printed handouts. Those were easy to generate; just spin
| up two machines and fix one while you leave the other
| broken. They can share resources if you like so you don't
| have recreate everything. That is horribly messy today.
| Testing is so hard most people don't do it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| In a sense, a parallel sysplex with remote hosts and
| storage is a very sophisticated private cloud environment
| that'll run your CICS transactions a lot like you do with
| AWS Lambda.
| epc wrote:
| The most logical place for a cloud service to develop
| inside IBM would have been IBM Global Services. IGS had a
| sort of proto-cloud set up in 1998-1999 (treated physical
| systems as cattle that could be remote wiped,
| virtualization would have been a logical next step) but
| sold off the organization building that to AT&T as part
| of the Global Network sale.
|
| I wrote a horrible, hacky, CMS PIPES based gopher/http
| server for VM some time in 1993 that was used internally
| for various "non serious" things. A colleague and I
| designed a native HTTP server for MVS in 1995 and had
| started coding it when we were more or less reprimanded
| and told to defer to the then Network Services division
| which was porting something (I think CERN httpd, they had
| a bizarre fascination with CERN) to MVS.
|
| It just wasn't in anyone's best interest to even
| experiment with web services on VM or MVS, let alone try
| to build a business out of it.
|
| Cloud happened after I left, but the infrastructure to
| build or respond to the rise of AWS was never in place,
| sort of by design.
| erk__ wrote:
| IBM has a event where you can get access to a mainframe
| and complete different tasks https://www.ibm.com/it-
| infrastructure/z/education/master-the...
|
| You can also get free access to small vps running Linux
| on a mainfram on the IBM cloud
| vbezhenar wrote:
| > You can also get free access to small vps running Linux
| on a mainfram on the IBM cloud
|
| What's the point? VM with linux is hardly interesting to
| anyone.
| erk__ wrote:
| I used it when I was doing some porting of smaller
| programs to run on z/Architecture for example setting up
| the de/compression co-processor correctly. It's true that
| Linux on x86 or arm is not unusual, but this is Linux on
| Z
| amitport wrote:
| "Sounds like it would be fun."
|
| Interesting at times but really really not fun
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Interesting to me is a big part of the fun. Learning
| something new...all that.
| amitport wrote:
| Well "to do mainframe development" is more than just the
| casual learning part.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Touche'
| dominicjj wrote:
| You can! You need to install the Hercules mainframe
| emulator and the freely available MVS 3.8 on top of it.
| There are compilers for COBOL, Fortran, PL/1 and assembly
| available. The go to guy on YouTube for getting all this
| working is moshix:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/c/moshix
| 7thaccount wrote:
| How close is it to the real deal in emulating something
| like a modern mainframe?
| dominicjj wrote:
| Very close to the real deal only when emulating a 370
| from the 80s. zOS is a different beast though even though
| it shares a lot of the asm underneath. But there is no
| way to run zOS for yourself without a license from IBM or
| access to a real z-series somehow.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Kinda what I figured. Th whole concept of a mainframe is
| pretty neat in that you can go through the 1000 page
| manual and have an idea about all that is possible,
| instead of an infinitely changing software tool ocean.
| The latter is probably better overall, but it would be
| neat to check out the mainframe paradigm.
| trasz wrote:
| Running z/OS on Hercules is trivially easy, you just need
| to ignore the license. The z/OS software distribution is
| usually called ADCD.
| dominicjj wrote:
| I should have said 'legally'.
| sennight wrote:
| Oh boy, that memory bus... I'll get to that in a second.
| First, yes, IBM creates IP blocks that they then license.
| Maybe I'm weird, but I view that as software - and I also
| heartily dislike IP block shops. What makes matters worse
| is how IBM has an awful track record when it comes to these
| licenses - they somehow always pick a partner that ensures
| the tech seeing little to no use. For example, you
| mentioned their memory bus... guess how they did that: they
| licensed (or sold?) Centaur to a single party, Microchip,
| who lists[0] a single memory controller with no price and
| no apparent interest in actually selling the thing. Also,
| Synopsys - one of those fabless companies that I love so
| much, is somehow involved[1]... resulting in memory
| controller binary blobs. It is pretty awesome really, I
| don't think IBM could have more surely murdered their tech
| if they'd tried.
|
| Now I'm pulling for them, I actually own a POWER9 machine.
| I think it is great that they want to get memory
| controllers out of the CPU - but they've done it in such a
| way that leads me to believe that it is an intentional
| sabotage, which would only happen if they genuinely had no
| interest in an active hardware role.
|
| [0] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM8596
|
| [1] https://github.com/open-power/ocmb-explorer-
| fw/blob/6570112a...
| pyuser583 wrote:
| A while ago I came across a really cool technology I
| wanted to use. Turns out it was patented, and the patent
| was bought by IBM.
|
| IBM had merged it into Watson, kept the acronym, but
| changed the words. Then they stopped making it available
| in any meaningful way.
|
| I was so pissed. I'm sure my company would have paid out
| the nose for it.
|
| I got the feeling it was a capture-and-kill situation.
| benlivengood wrote:
| > I think it is great that they want to get memory
| controllers out of the CPU
|
| The trend is out of the CPU now? I was hoping they would
| instead start layering DRAM stacks on the CPU die.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It goes both ways.
|
| HBM on the die is crazy high performance.
|
| With a bus like CXL you could have a card full of memory
| chips that is shared by multiple CPUs. The z machines
| have a system like this it is just proprietary for them.
|
| Memory that is less coupled to the CPU won't be as fast
| as HBM but you can have a lot more of it.
| sennight wrote:
| The writing has been on the wall for a while when it
| comes the next major bottleneck. I'm surprised that Intel
| was able to keep their quad-core game running for as long
| as they did, but "chiplets" were obviously going to have
| to happen, which stresses IO. IBM solved that a long time
| ago - as demonstrated by the massive IO bandwidth on
| display for several hardware generations. POWER9 came in
| two flavors, one with on chip memory controllers and one
| with their traditional off die strategy. So definitely
| not new - but its always been very boutique and therefor
| very expensive. Their OMI proposal was supposed to change
| that - but it won't, given the awful way they've executed
| it. Anybody remember that time that IBM's PS/2 offering
| had a major positive impact on the industry and didn't
| lead to a mess of dead ends? Me neither... this will be
| like that.
| jordemort wrote:
| Perhaps it is COBOL bindings for the Watson API?
| gpderetta wrote:
| I think it is an AI-processed dialect of COBOL and INTERCAL
| where you have to prepend PLEASE every few statements to get
| the compiler-AI to parse it.
| krylon wrote:
| In order to get the compiler to optimize your code, you
| have to say PRETTY PLEASE, though, and THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
| ;-) PRETTY PLEASE ADD
| SALES_TAX TO PRICE GIVING NET_PRICE THANK YOU VERY
| MUCH
| nabla9 wrote:
| IBM Z systems seem to have a good but conservative cryptography
| and security model.
|
| I was surprised to find out that Z15 already supports CRYSTALS-
| Dilithium-6-5 digital signature algorithm. It's a lattice based
| post-quantum cryptography algorithm. I assumed that those
| algorithms are still under development.
|
| https://pq-crystals.org/dilithium/
| throw0101a wrote:
| Two of the co-authors for that work at IBM Research Europe.
| rbanffy wrote:
| BTW, with the end of AT&T, is IBM now the company with the
| most Nobel laureates per employee?
| nabla9 wrote:
| Nokia owns Bell Labs, so maybe Nokia has the most Nobel
| laureates and Turing award winners per employee :)
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'd have run away when Elop took over.
| danpalmer wrote:
| > 71% of executives surveyed say mainframe-based applications are
| central to their business strategy; and in three years, the
| percentage of organizations leveraging mainframe assets in a
| hybrid cloud environment is expected to increase by more than 2x.
|
| Reading between the lines, doesn't this say that the execs are
| concerned about being so heavily reliant on their mainframes and
| so are transitioning mainframe workloads to cloud environments at
| a rapid pace?
| kitd wrote:
| I think it means they're incorporating mainfame H/W into their
| hybrid cloud infrastructure.
| danpalmer wrote:
| You're right that's probably what they intend it to mean, but
| I think there is a reading of it that they are moving
| workloads from mainframes to the cloud, and during that
| process will be "hybrid cloud with mainframes".
| rbanffy wrote:
| You can get Linux VMs running on z15 hardware from IBM
| Cloud, with all the encryption and misc security features
| the architecture allows.
| luma wrote:
| I'd parse that as customers which have mainframes are also
| doing hybrid cloud. They don't overtly state that the mainframe
| workloads are going to cloud, just that some number of
| customers who have mainframes also have cloud workloads, and
| that number will probably be bigger than it was before.
|
| When dealing with IBM, it's always safest to assume the
| weaseleiest interpretation of their weasel words.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Also, you can virtualize a lot of Linux boxes inside a full
| LinuxONE machine. And almost a gigabyte of L4 cache for every
| four 5.2 GHz CPs makes it a seriously fast single-thread
| machine. Add to that all that hardware offloading for IO and
| you end up with a lot more capacity that you'd have on the
| same datacenter volume.
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| I think it just means they have non-mainframe stuff running in
| the cloud that the mainframes need to access.
|
| Like "uh, we moved payroll to cloud and this mainframe job
| needs that data".
| raverbashing wrote:
| It seems IBMs business model is to make the customer pay more
| with time until they give up and leap from their (legacy)
| platform, at which point they migrate to something ground
| breaking like... DB2 on x86 (of course it would have been
| cheaper to migrate things 10 yr. ago but the oxygen restriction
| caused by neckties usually prevents some kinds of foresight)
| zenron wrote:
| Marketing speak for Green Screens are now going to be Sky Blue
| Screens.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Why does IBM sell both POWER based systems and Mainframes? Why do
| they sell both a mainframe OS and AIX?
|
| It seems like they sell some products that might compete with
| themselves.
| ch_123 wrote:
| At various points IBM tried to consolidate their product lines
| around a single architecture and software platform. Some of the
| noteworthy examples of this are the Future Systems project in
| the 70s, the Fort Knox project in the 80s, and the Workplace OS
| project in the 90s.
|
| All of these proved to be complete disasters. Ultimately, the
| value add they provide to the people that use them is that the
| backwards compatibility. Trying to consolidate them all created
| compromises and complexity which sank the projects in question.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| So anyone who does not currently use IBM, should probably run
| the other way and never use them?
| trasz wrote:
| I'd say one of those did work just fine: when they
| consolidated AS/400 and RS/6000.
| ch_123 wrote:
| Fair point. The AS/400 itself was also a successful
| consolidation of the S/36 and S/38 product lines.
|
| Consolidation has worked on a relatively small scale where
| two platforms were combined, attempts to produce one
| platform to rule them all have generally failed.
| unixhero wrote:
| Wtf can I run this on? A mainframe? Hahaha you have got to be
| joking IBM.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-27 23:01 UTC)