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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

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.

jordemort 5y ago
Perhaps it is COBOL bindings for the Watson API?
- gpderetta 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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
jareds 5y ago
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.
mhh__ 5y ago
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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  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.
sennight 5y ago
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_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facilit...
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  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/ https://www.computeexpresslink.org/
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        It’s interesting that IBM wasn’t sooner to the cloud with superior virtualization technology.
skissane 5y ago
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-V2.5-Education/What's%20New%20in%20zOS%20v2.5%20-%20Preview%20Edition.pdf 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.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  How does that compare dollar-for-dollar to running Tensorflow on a dedicated Linux cluster with GPUs?
  - hvs 5y ago
    Probably much more expensive.
  - pjmorris 5y ago
    Probably depends on whether you've already got the mainframe or not, and whether you've got the dedicated Linux cluster or or not.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Do the specific Nvidia cards you'd ideally want for ML have s390x drivers?

jordemort 5y ago

Perhaps it is COBOL bindings for the Watson API?

gpderetta 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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

jareds 5y ago

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.

mhh__ 5y ago

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 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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.

sennight 5y ago

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_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facilit...

PaulHoule 5y ago
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/ https://www.computeexpresslink.org/
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      It’s interesting that IBM wasn’t sooner to the cloud with superior virtualization technology.

skissane 5y ago

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-V2.5-Education/What's%20New%20in%20zOS%20v2.5%20-%20Preview%20Edition.pdf 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.

jacquesm 5y ago
How does that compare dollar-for-dollar to running Tensorflow on a dedicated Linux cluster with GPUs?
- hvs 5y ago
  Probably much more expensive.
- pjmorris 5y ago
  Probably depends on whether you've already got the mainframe or not, and whether you've got the dedicated Linux cluster or or not.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Do the specific Nvidia cards you'd ideally want for ML have s390x drivers?