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Indeed, scaling out is more complex than scaling up. Especially when you need to scale a lot. But maybe the major mainframe using industry is banking. Processi

Indeed, scaling out is more complex than scaling up. Especially when you need to scale a lot. But maybe the major mainframe using industry is banking. Processing many transactions does require scale, but not so much that the complexities of scaling out (ditributed Linux based system) are worse than the cost of scaling up (renting a mainframe). I'm experiencing this on a daily base; you "only" need 100's of servers (not 1000's or more) to process banking data (let's say 100-150 transactions per second on average, with peaks of 500).

rbanffy 6y ago
It's not just scaling - it's the reliability and availability features too. While you can get a very powerful 8-socket x86 with 48 TB of RAM and tons of IO from Lenovo's website, if a CPU or memory DIMM goes bad you'll need to stop it for maintenance.
- dralley 6y ago
  One of my older coworkers claims that one of the most impressive things he's seen in his career was an IBM mobile tech demo (mainframe in a semi truck) where the technician conducting the demo would reach into the machine and start randomly pulling out CPUs and memory, and then plugging them back in. The display would show the available resources and throughout of whatever computation they were running for the demo decrease as hardware was removed and then increase as it was added back, and the whole thing happened seamlessly without impacting the compute job.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    I think CPU and memory hotplug is par for the course these days on many server-class platforms. In fact memory hotplug would be quite useful on mobile hardware since it would allow the OS to power down RAM modules automatically when that memory is not being used, and add them back as needed.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      I can power down sockets and cores on my machine, but I'm pretty sure I can't physically pull out a CPU without a decent chance of having the magical smoke escape the machine.
lboc 6y ago
Visa could process up to "47,000 transaction messages per second" in 2013 according to: https://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-prepares-visanet-for-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year/index.html https://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-...
- leokennis 6y ago
  I’m very curious what “process” means in this case: - Read a line from a file? - Insert a transaction into a database? - Call an API using the transaction data? - Fully process the transaction (a combination of the above and then some)? Yes, mainframes are very fast, especially for some specific tasks. But they’re still just computers.

rbanffy 6y ago

It's not just scaling - it's the reliability and availability features too. While you can get a very powerful 8-socket x86 with 48 TB of RAM and tons of IO from Lenovo's website, if a CPU or memory DIMM goes bad you'll need to stop it for maintenance.

dralley 6y ago
One of my older coworkers claims that one of the most impressive things he's seen in his career was an IBM mobile tech demo (mainframe in a semi truck) where the technician conducting the demo would reach into the machine and start randomly pulling out CPUs and memory, and then plugging them back in. The display would show the available resources and throughout of whatever computation they were running for the demo decrease as hardware was removed and then increase as it was added back, and the whole thing happened seamlessly without impacting the compute job.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  I think CPU and memory hotplug is par for the course these days on many server-class platforms. In fact memory hotplug would be quite useful on mobile hardware since it would allow the OS to power down RAM modules automatically when that memory is not being used, and add them back as needed.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    I can power down sockets and cores on my machine, but I'm pretty sure I can't physically pull out a CPU without a decent chance of having the magical smoke escape the machine.

lboc 6y ago

Visa could process up to "47,000 transaction messages per second" in 2013 according to: https://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-prepares-visanet-for-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year/index.html https://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-...

leokennis 6y ago
I’m very curious what “process” means in this case: - Read a line from a file? - Insert a transaction into a database? - Call an API using the transaction data? - Fully process the transaction (a combination of the above and then some)? Yes, mainframes are very fast, especially for some specific tasks. But they’re still just computers.