6 ms·

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 lik

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.
      - mimixco 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        Well, not just mainframes generally, but if they created AWS on mainframes and hosted them… that would have made it accessible for startups.
        mimixco 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        I would argue neither has AWS yet…
        ngcc_hk 5y ago
        The organisation is also in the way. Both in Ibm and for those teams using ibm. Very bureaucratic and like token ring over management kill. Good and have its niche. But murder by the liberal Ethernet.
    - ngcc_hk 5y ago
      It is so stressful and alienated that the decades spent on mainframe is good but not great. I worked on the partition Management called lpar. Os and db2 etc. It is sort of more interesting to do dos/vse. I guess instead of thousands of users you have hundreds. I love my Hp 200 dos calculator whilst waiting for the cartridge to run, … at least it is not open reel tape as the cartridge tape at least always suck in.
  - erk__ 5y ago
    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-mainframe 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 5y ago
      > 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__ 5y ago
        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
      - exikyut 5y ago
        Amusingly, I signed up for this a couple days ago (https://mtm.masterthemainframe.com/ https://mtm.masterthemainframe.com/), which worked fine at the time, but the following day when I went to follow up I discovered the HTTPS cert had expired :D That was several hours ago. The site's still down.
        exikyut 5y ago
        UPDATE: THE DOMAIN EXPIRED HAHAHA Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210729160256/https://mtm.masterthemainframe.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210729160256/https://mtm.maste...
        exikyut 5y ago
        Update-update: Bureaucracy, Inc™ has belatedly noticed and exercised untold power to bring the domain back in a great hurry. Everything's back to exactly how it was before, even down to using "" (ie, empty string) where my name should be. Excellent. I must say that site responsiveness is much, much slower than it was when it was serving spam. :D
  - dominicjj 5y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/c/moshix
    - 7thaccount 5y ago
      How close is it to the real deal in emulating something like a modern mainframe?
      - dominicjj 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        I should have said 'legally'.
        7thaccount 5y ago
  - amitport 5y ago
    "Sounds like it would be fun." Interesting at times but really really not fun
    - 7thaccount 5y ago
      Interesting to me is a big part of the fun. Learning something new...all that.
      - amitport 5y ago
        Well "to do mainframe development" is more than just the casual learning part.
        7thaccount 5y ago
        Touche'
- erk__ 5y ago
  There is also stuff like a sorting co-processor which I find interesting https://blog.share.org/Technology-Article/peeking-under-the-hood-of-sort-acceleration-on-z15 https://blog.share.org/Technology-Article/peeking-under-the-...
- sennight 5y ago
  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 https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM8596 [1] https://github.com/open-power/ocmb-explorer-fw/blob/6570112a868caae3b3b3ee4f02778165c69ea867/README-LICENSE-Microchip%20PM8596%20Explorer%20Firmware_v3.pdf https://github.com/open-power/ocmb-explorer-fw/blob/6570112a...
  - benlivengood 5y ago
    > 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.
    - sennight 5y ago
      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.

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.
    - mimixco 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        Well, not just mainframes generally, but if they created AWS on mainframes and hosted them… that would have made it accessible for startups.
        mimixco 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        I would argue neither has AWS yet…
        ngcc_hk 5y ago
        The organisation is also in the way. Both in Ibm and for those teams using ibm. Very bureaucratic and like token ring over management kill. Good and have its niche. But murder by the liberal Ethernet.
  - ngcc_hk 5y ago
    It is so stressful and alienated that the decades spent on mainframe is good but not great. I worked on the partition Management called lpar. Os and db2 etc. It is sort of more interesting to do dos/vse. I guess instead of thousands of users you have hundreds. I love my Hp 200 dos calculator whilst waiting for the cartridge to run, … at least it is not open reel tape as the cartridge tape at least always suck in.
- erk__ 5y ago
  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-mainframe 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 5y ago
    > 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__ 5y ago
      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
    - exikyut 5y ago
      Amusingly, I signed up for this a couple days ago (https://mtm.masterthemainframe.com/ https://mtm.masterthemainframe.com/), which worked fine at the time, but the following day when I went to follow up I discovered the HTTPS cert had expired :D That was several hours ago. The site's still down.
      - exikyut 5y ago
        UPDATE: THE DOMAIN EXPIRED HAHAHA Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210729160256/https://mtm.masterthemainframe.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210729160256/https://mtm.maste...
        exikyut 5y ago
        Update-update: Bureaucracy, Inc™ has belatedly noticed and exercised untold power to bring the domain back in a great hurry. Everything's back to exactly how it was before, even down to using "" (ie, empty string) where my name should be. Excellent. I must say that site responsiveness is much, much slower than it was when it was serving spam. :D
- dominicjj 5y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/c/moshix
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    How close is it to the real deal in emulating something like a modern mainframe?
    - dominicjj 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        I should have said 'legally'.
        7thaccount 5y ago
- amitport 5y ago
  "Sounds like it would be fun." Interesting at times but really really not fun
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    Interesting to me is a big part of the fun. Learning something new...all that.
    - amitport 5y ago
      Well "to do mainframe development" is more than just the casual learning part.
      - 7thaccount 5y ago
        Touche'
erk__ 5y ago
There is also stuff like a sorting co-processor which I find interesting https://blog.share.org/Technology-Article/peeking-under-the-hood-of-sort-acceleration-on-z15 https://blog.share.org/Technology-Article/peeking-under-the-...
sennight 5y ago
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 https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM8596 [1] https://github.com/open-power/ocmb-explorer-fw/blob/6570112a868caae3b3b3ee4f02778165c69ea867/README-LICENSE-Microchip%20PM8596%20Explorer%20Firmware_v3.pdf https://github.com/open-power/ocmb-explorer-fw/blob/6570112a...
- benlivengood 5y ago
  > 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.
  - sennight 5y ago
    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.