[HN Gopher] The Future of Big Iron: An Interview with IBM's Chri...
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The Future of Big Iron: An Interview with IBM's Christian Jacobi
Author : rbanffy
Score : 53 points
Date : 2024-10-15 09:13 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (morethanmoore.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (morethanmoore.substack.com)
| mindcrime wrote:
| CEREAL Oh yeah, you want a seriously
| righteous hack, you score one of those
| Gibsons man. You know, supercomputers
| they use to like, do physics, and look
| for oil and stuff?
| PHREAK Ain't no way, man, security's too
| tight. The big iron?
| DADE Maybe. But, if I were gonna hack
| some heavy metal, I'd, uh, work my way
| back through some low security, and try
| the back door.
| stonethrowaway wrote:
| Came for the news, stayed for the Hackers.
| froh wrote:
| Jacobi is one of 70 IBM Fellows (think IBM internal professors,
| free reign over a research budget, you gain the title with
| technical prowess plus business acumen)
|
| at the heart of the Mainframe success is this:
|
| > I'd say high-availability and resiliency means many things, but
| in particular, two things. It means you have to catch any error
| that happens in the system - either because a transistor breaks
| down due to wear over the lifetime, or you get particle
| injections, or whatever can happen. You detect the stuff and then
| you have mechanisms to recover. You can't just add this on top
| after the design is done, you have to be really thinking about it
| from the get-go.
|
| and then he goes into details how that is achieved. the article
| nicely goes into some details.
|
| oh and combine the 99.9999999% availability "nine nines" with
| insane throughput. as in real time phone wiretapping throughput,
| or real time mass financial transactions, of course.
|
| or a web server for an online image service.
|
| or "your personal web server in a mouse click", sharing 10.000
| such virtual machines on a single physical machine. which has a
| shared read only /ist partition mounted into all guests. not
| containers, no, virtual machines, in ca 2006...
|
| "don't trust a computer you can lift"
| wolf550e wrote:
| The amount of throughput you can get out of AMD EPYC zen5
| servers for the price of a basic mainframe is insane. Even if
| IBM wins in single core perf using absurd amount of cache and
| absurd cooling solution, the total rack throughput is
| definitely won by "commodity" hardware.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Maybe, but then you need to engineer the 99.99999% uptime
| yourself.
|
| If it were actually cheaper, IBM wouldn't be selling these
| machines so well.
| wolf550e wrote:
| I don't think they are actually selling those machines so
| well. They have a captive legacy custom base, who else is
| buying those?
| neverartful wrote:
| From TFA: "Overall, Z is growing very healthily. LinuxONE
| is the fastest area of growth for us right now."
|
| However, he didn't elaborate or give any examples. If I
| were the interviewer, I would have followed it with:
| "Oh?! Can you provide some examples for the readers who
| believe that you only sell to captive audiences?"
| Muromec wrote:
| They are mostly selling to the captive audience who is 40
| years deep into COBOL and can't pull out until it falls on
| top of them.
| neverartful wrote:
| These comments always come up with every mainframe post. It's
| not only about performance. If it were it would be x86 or
| pSystems (AIX/POWER). The reason customers buy mainframes is
| RAS (reliabililty, availability, scalability). Notice that
| performance is not part of RAS.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| Big Iron speedrun any%
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMRCye4JhEo&list=PL5ty576dcO...
|
| (we need a bit of silly in our lives)
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Honestly mainframes sound like what on-premise aims for. You get
| uptime and proactive maintenance and stuff just runs. Yet the
| machine is on your premise and the data belongs to you.
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