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The support laptop on an IBM mainframe is analogous to the setup on a Cray machine. The System Management Workstation or 'SMW' (previously a Supermicro tower wo
by theideaofcoffee 7y ago
The support laptop on an IBM mainframe is analogous to the setup on a Cray machine. The System Management Workstation or 'SMW' (previously a Supermicro tower workstation with a bunch of ethernet), now a Dell Poweredge rackmount is its own system which controls the rest of the machine--booting, shutdown, and all of the other myriad maintenance tasks on a cluster like that. It's also responsible for building boot images and interrogating the low level controllers on each rack and on system blades themselves.
During bringup of a machine like that, the SMW host is installed first from scratch with a Linux distribution, hardware inventory is enumerated, boot images are built for individual node roles in the system and then the system performs its boot procedure.