3 ms·
I really don't understand why in 4 racks you can have only 4 CPU drawers and 12 I/O drawers. This seems like their IO is incredibly inefficient.
by UltraSane 2y ago
I really don't understand why in 4 racks you can have only 4 CPU drawers and 12 I/O drawers. This seems like their IO is incredibly inefficient.
- rbanffy 2y agoHave you seen the size of those drawers? A single rack can only fit five of them, and you still would need to add processing, power/UPS, and cooling.
- UltraSane 2y agoThe CPU drawers are 5U while the I/O drawers are 8U. https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/IMWUC/UploadedImages/wDe0H7MRHahpfSpY1qLE_z17_max_full_view.png https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/IMWUC/UploadedI...
- froh 2y ago> zSeries IO seems insufficient because of the number of I/O drawers a surprising statement. mind to elaborate? asking because sustained, dependable and high I/O per floor space (combined with high throughput low latency compute) are the core selling points of zSeries
- os2warpman 2y agoEach I/O drawer is 16 x16 hot-swappable PCIe+ slots, an interconnect module, and a management unit. Each CPC drawer can up to 3 I/O drawers for up to 48 x16 hot-swappable PCIe+ slots and a system can have up to four CPC drawers for a total of 192 potential PCIe+ modules. If you set it up right any process running on any CPC drawer can directly access any PCIe+ device in the system no matter where it is. If you're super slick, any process running on any CPC drawer in a Z17 that is directly connected to another Z17, even one many miles away, can directly access any PCIe+ device in the remote system. I don't know if anyone is actually doing that. That would be silly. Doing that requires a lot of stuff, which takes up space.
- UltraSane 2y agoVery impressive. Seems like they use a lot of PCIe switches. IBM technology could be as common as Linux and x86 if they didn't overcharge so badly.