4 ms·

Very exotic. Does it support multi threading? What kind of things can be done with it?

foobarian 3y ago
I'm guessing it does money math in a certain way vetted by this field that would be very difficult to recertify on some replacement.
- airstrike 3y ago
  For some value of "very difficult"
- slt2021 3y ago
  not the COBOL language, but the IBM mainframes have five nines of availability, duplication of every component, how swappable everything from power supplies to CPU and RAM. Can get to more than five nines if used parallel sysplex, but the big iron is incredibly reliable. This is the reason why all banks, airlines, and other old-school businesses have been running mainframes and cannot ever migrate off of them. this stuff was engineered like it was an airplane full of people
  - salawat 3y ago
    ...that wasn't made by Boeing in the last 20 years.
  - simne 3y ago
    > IBM mainframes have five nines of availability This is incredible. I miss that time, when seen with naked eye difference of reliability of mainframes. Now, I know many organizations using Erlang/OTP or Java EE, and mostly think them good enough comparable to mainframes environment and few times cheaper. BTW Erlang in British Telecom achieve five nines reliability. But must admit, Erlang/Java are not best suited for finance/lawyer applications, and I don't hear about finance/law libraries for Erlang, so this could be issue (or opportunity for somebody, depend on how you look on it).
  - Affric 3y ago
    lol… this comment just makes me remember that how likely you are to die is determined by an estimate of what a company can get away with by an actuary.
    - foobarian 3y ago
      And your comment just made me wonder if the two recent Boeing crashes actually mean the IBM hardware is even *more* reliable
      - simne 3y ago
        IBM hardware is reliable, BUT, IBM avoid to go to airspace industry as flight computer supplier. After Saturn-5, flight computers made by other companies. Its hard to understand, if this is because conservative regulations, or because not enough money for such big company, but fact, that IBM electronics near absent from large civilian airplanes.
      - slt2021 3y ago
        recent scandals with Boeing and United is the result of trump deregulating airlines. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/03/942345240/trump-administrations-new-regulation-favors-airlines-at-travelers-expense https://www.npr.org/2020/12/03/942345240/trump-administratio... a lot of regulation just became "self-certify" and companies obviously cut costs and outsourced everything including fleet maintenance. this article is from 2015 - but things got way worse since then https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance-disturbing-truth https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance... European airlines and Airbus are flying just fine, it is Americans that have a problem due to over politicized and polarized society and corrupt politicians
        ralph84 3y ago
        The MAX was certified less than 2 months after Trump took office. He had nothing to do with it.
        3y ago
  - lupire 3y ago
    Modern cloud backend data processing is 5 9s reliable too, for very core stuff, not all the app frontends and minor features.
    - shrubble 3y ago
      You don't even have the assurance that the RAM is ECC on cloud...
    - asp_hornet 3y ago
      Modern cloud “5 nines” isnt a promise of availability but a promise to get some store credit each month when it inevitably fails (adjusted down for usage because you dont use all that capacity you pay for so we just credit for the percentage you do). The trick is to make sure when you promise 5 9s to your customer that you build in the same bullshit clauses so you dont get left holding the bag. Its gross
  - miki123211 3y ago
    And yet my bank very regularly goes down for (scheduled) technical maintenance. Most mom-and-pop stores running Wordpress on shared PHP hosting are more reliable than that.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
      It's the servers that go down! Not the 'frames. Those will go down maybe once a year for maintenance, if that. The mainframe engineers will brag your ears off about that and about the unreliability of the "distributed" systems (a.k.a. servers, a.k.a. what everyone else uses). When you log on to your online banking you're interacting with servers, not with the mainframes directly. The servers are the interface, the mainframe is the, let's say far back end. That will be handling millions of transactions a second while the servers are down for maintenance- like handling payments and transfers etc, not just online banking. Which is why it can't keep failing every few months or so.
      - miki123211 3y ago
        I definitely remember my bank warning me about credit and debit card unavailability, so it's definitely not just the online systems. If cards don't work and the online systems don't work, I don't know what else does. Those maintenance periods usually happen at night, so branches aren't open and wire transfer systems don't work.
        YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
        I don't know the particulars about your bank, obviously but the thing is, mainframes serve so many millions of clients, and that's clients of the largest money transfer networks (Amex, Visa, Master, everyone really) that if there's an outage it will make the news, internationally, and it will be front page news too. With live updates. In fact, if I think about it, I don't think I remember any time when a serious outage that was eventually explained in the press was the fault of some mainframe going down. Usually it's something else, like someone misconfigured something or something didn't update correctly etc. stuff that sounds a lot like day-to-day web dev stuff. So I think maybe it was something else that went on with your bank, that only affected your bank. Like inkyoto says below, maybe some DNS went down?

I'm guessing it does money math in a certain way vetted by this field that would be very difficult to recertify on some replacement.

airstrike 3y ago
For some value of "very difficult"
slt2021 3y ago
not the COBOL language, but the IBM mainframes have five nines of availability, duplication of every component, how swappable everything from power supplies to CPU and RAM. Can get to more than five nines if used parallel sysplex, but the big iron is incredibly reliable. This is the reason why all banks, airlines, and other old-school businesses have been running mainframes and cannot ever migrate off of them. this stuff was engineered like it was an airplane full of people
- salawat 3y ago
  ...that wasn't made by Boeing in the last 20 years.
- simne 3y ago
  > IBM mainframes have five nines of availability This is incredible. I miss that time, when seen with naked eye difference of reliability of mainframes. Now, I know many organizations using Erlang/OTP or Java EE, and mostly think them good enough comparable to mainframes environment and few times cheaper. BTW Erlang in British Telecom achieve five nines reliability. But must admit, Erlang/Java are not best suited for finance/lawyer applications, and I don't hear about finance/law libraries for Erlang, so this could be issue (or opportunity for somebody, depend on how you look on it).
- Affric 3y ago
  lol… this comment just makes me remember that how likely you are to die is determined by an estimate of what a company can get away with by an actuary.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    And your comment just made me wonder if the two recent Boeing crashes actually mean the IBM hardware is even *more* reliable
    - simne 3y ago
      IBM hardware is reliable, BUT, IBM avoid to go to airspace industry as flight computer supplier. After Saturn-5, flight computers made by other companies. Its hard to understand, if this is because conservative regulations, or because not enough money for such big company, but fact, that IBM electronics near absent from large civilian airplanes.
    - slt2021 3y ago
      recent scandals with Boeing and United is the result of trump deregulating airlines. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/03/942345240/trump-administrations-new-regulation-favors-airlines-at-travelers-expense https://www.npr.org/2020/12/03/942345240/trump-administratio... a lot of regulation just became "self-certify" and companies obviously cut costs and outsourced everything including fleet maintenance. this article is from 2015 - but things got way worse since then https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance-disturbing-truth https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance... European airlines and Airbus are flying just fine, it is Americans that have a problem due to over politicized and polarized society and corrupt politicians
      - ralph84 3y ago
        The MAX was certified less than 2 months after Trump took office. He had nothing to do with it.
        3y ago
- lupire 3y ago
  Modern cloud backend data processing is 5 9s reliable too, for very core stuff, not all the app frontends and minor features.
  - shrubble 3y ago
    You don't even have the assurance that the RAM is ECC on cloud...
  - asp_hornet 3y ago
    Modern cloud “5 nines” isnt a promise of availability but a promise to get some store credit each month when it inevitably fails (adjusted down for usage because you dont use all that capacity you pay for so we just credit for the percentage you do). The trick is to make sure when you promise 5 9s to your customer that you build in the same bullshit clauses so you dont get left holding the bag. Its gross
- miki123211 3y ago
  And yet my bank very regularly goes down for (scheduled) technical maintenance. Most mom-and-pop stores running Wordpress on shared PHP hosting are more reliable than that.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
    It's the servers that go down! Not the 'frames. Those will go down maybe once a year for maintenance, if that. The mainframe engineers will brag your ears off about that and about the unreliability of the "distributed" systems (a.k.a. servers, a.k.a. what everyone else uses). When you log on to your online banking you're interacting with servers, not with the mainframes directly. The servers are the interface, the mainframe is the, let's say far back end. That will be handling millions of transactions a second while the servers are down for maintenance- like handling payments and transfers etc, not just online banking. Which is why it can't keep failing every few months or so.
    - miki123211 3y ago
      I definitely remember my bank warning me about credit and debit card unavailability, so it's definitely not just the online systems. If cards don't work and the online systems don't work, I don't know what else does. Those maintenance periods usually happen at night, so branches aren't open and wire transfer systems don't work.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
        I don't know the particulars about your bank, obviously but the thing is, mainframes serve so many millions of clients, and that's clients of the largest money transfer networks (Amex, Visa, Master, everyone really) that if there's an outage it will make the news, internationally, and it will be front page news too. With live updates. In fact, if I think about it, I don't think I remember any time when a serious outage that was eventually explained in the press was the fault of some mainframe going down. Usually it's something else, like someone misconfigured something or something didn't update correctly etc. stuff that sounds a lot like day-to-day web dev stuff. So I think maybe it was something else that went on with your bank, that only affected your bank. Like inkyoto says below, maybe some DNS went down?