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The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

arstechnica.com

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Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#141

Post by lizknope »

StillBored wrote: post #131

"Today’s IBM mainframe CPUs are based on a highly evolved version of the POWER architecture that IBM has been developing for over 30 years. " I've heard a lot of largely clueless people who weren't aware of the differences between the zeries and pseries say something like this, but its generally been entirely false (especially 15-30 years ago which overlaps with some time I myself spent at IBM). Given the rest of the…

Yeah, I don't know where the author is getting the POWER arch connection.

I thought the IBM Z Architecture was the CISC based System 360 / 390 architecture from the 1960's. At least that is what I remember my one friend who has some mainframe experience was telling me.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#142

Post by sb-alien »

sb-alien wrote: post #132

I was involved in an IBM mainframe to RS/6000 migration in the mid 1990s for a major aerospace company. We moved the engineering functionality to a client/server system, including many custom programs and CAD/CAM/CAE. Like the article mentioned, migration was a Herculean task done over a period of years, with a good chance it wouldn't succeed. I worked many 70 hour weeks, I had to drive to the factory at 2AM some day…

After the migration, when they were "decomissioning" the mainframe itself, the company photographer took a picture of the migration team gathered around the mainframe. It was unplugged, being gutted, with copper pipes sticking out. Years later, looking at a print, it reminded me of the old pictures of a whaling crew gathered around a whale carcass--don't get me wrong, whales are much more valuable and important. It does seem like we helped destroy something we really didn't completely understand the value of.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#143

Post by [deleted] »

lizknope wrote: post #34

I've never used or even seen a mainframe in 26 years in the tech industry. My brother in law works for a bank and basically the business runs on it. The hardware and software are certainly impressive but does anyone use a mainframe for a new project and not just upgrading or expanding an existing system? I'm in integrated circuit design and we have compute clusters with thousands of CPUs. For some jobs we use a singl…

[deleted]

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#144

Post by neverartful »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #92
neverartful wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't make sense to me. I believe that IBM has found the forced upgrade path for hardware/software like Apple has perfected. You may not be able to run old versions of IBM's software and still have it be supported by them. Same for the hardware. I don't think you would commonly find and old mainframe (the hardware) in operation. At the last place I worked that had mainframes, they would upgrade to new models every…

I call BS on this. I never heard of upgrading mainframes every 2-3 years. It makes no sense. Mainframes are huge investments meant to last a long time, it is not a PC you replace in a few years.

Call BS all you want, I don't care. I know what I witnessed. I don't know if the mainframes were owned are leased, but they were swapped out for new ones every few years.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#145

Post by throwawaylinux »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #4

The reason mainframe persists is it's a pretty slick development and deployment environment. A lot things you might cobble together as dependencies - like maybe a database or a message queue, or observability facilities or even deployment strategies like hot-hot deployments - they're all just built in to the platform. That means they're trivial to consume and they're fully supported by one vendor. It's like the world…

The hardware is quite radically different. It's not the mechanical form factor or bulk electrical and cooling of it, but the silicon.

The processor checkpoints state, and if an error is detected it can be rolled back and the checkpoint moved to another physical processor and re-started transparently to software. Stores are tracked all the way down to "RAID memory" (actually called RAIM), whereas in other CPUs they get punted off at the L1 cache. Practically every component and connection is redundant. There are stories of mainframe drawers being hauled to particle accelerators and the beam switched on while they're running. Quite amazing machines.

Not to say that has more value than the software (I don't know one way or the other), but the hardware is no gimmick.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#146

Post by jjav »

hinkley wrote: post #85
CraigJPerry wrote: post #4

The reason mainframe persists is it's a pretty slick development and deployment environment. A lot things you might cobble together as dependencies - like maybe a database or a message queue, or observability facilities or even deployment strategies like hot-hot deployments - they're all just built in to the platform. That means they're trivial to consume and they're fully supported by one vendor. It's like the world…

Most of this Cloud technology we like to go all atwitter about is a retread or a redesign of software that's been on mainframes for thirty years. The old farts must laugh themselves silly looking at us acting like we discovered a large white object orbiting the earth.

I'm not old enough (or been in the appropriate industry) to have worked with mainframes. I started in the heyday of the workstations (Sun, HP-UX, AIX, SGI) as a reaction to the annoyances of mainframes.

Why pay for disk and compute access when you can have a workstation! Why have limited access to the system when you can have your own! Was the vibe.

It is amusing/sad that in the AWS world we're right back to basically mainframes. Centrally hosted massive compute that you don't really have full control or access and have to pay for use time.

I wonder when the next swing back to personal computing arrives?

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#147

Post by jjav »

hinkley wrote: post #125
queuebert wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posit that most tech companies make money by poorly recreating old technologies for use by younger people ignorant of the old ones. E.g. how many variants of IRC have we had now? Usenet? VMs?

I think we need history classes in programming, and possibly comparative literature classes but for code.

I've long been a proponent of computing history as required part of CS.

Progress is supposed to work by standing on the shoulder of giants. But that only works if engineers are aware of what came before, how it worked, what was good and bad about it.

In the software world the same things are continuously being reinvented but the lessons of the past are not integrated because the inventors have no knowledge of the past 10 times the same thing was done. So every lesson has to be learned anew in production. That's not progress.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#148

Post by hinkley »

jjav wrote: post #146
hinkley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of this Cloud technology we like to go all atwitter about is a retread or a redesign of software that's been on mainframes for thirty years. The old farts must laugh themselves silly looking at us acting like we discovered a large white object orbiting the earth.

I'm not old enough (or been in the appropriate industry) to have worked with mainframes. I started in the heyday of the workstations (Sun, HP-UX, AIX, SGI) as a reaction to the annoyances of mainframes. Why pay for disk and compute access when you can have a workstation! Why have limited access to the system when you can have your own! Was the vibe. It is amusing/sad that in the AWS world we're right back to basicall…

You're old enough to have noticed that we cycle between client-server and peer-peer about every decade. Sometimes it's hardware, sometimes it's software.

The pendulum swings, and never seems to stop.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#149

Post by kmoser »

coleca wrote: post #33
kkielhofner wrote: post #19

"They’re designed to process large amounts of critical data while maintaining a 99.999 percent uptime—that’s three seconds of outage per year." Very wrong. Five nines is five minutes and 13 seconds of cumulative downtime in a year[0]. Three seconds of downtime in a year is seven nines[1]. [0] - https://uptime.is/five-nines [1] - https://uptime.is/99.99999

I've always heard that as "scheduled uptime" or "unscheduled outages". When I worked in a mainframe shop, they used to IPL (reboot) the mainframe every Sunday morning. That down time was never considered as part of the SLA.

Wow, even Windows boxes can run longer than a week without having to be rebooted. I figured a mainframe would be able to last almost indefinitely.

Re: The IBM mainframe: How it runs and why it survives

#150

Post by Merrill »

jjav wrote: post #146
hinkley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of this Cloud technology we like to go all atwitter about is a retread or a redesign of software that's been on mainframes for thirty years. The old farts must laugh themselves silly looking at us acting like we discovered a large white object orbiting the earth.

I'm not old enough (or been in the appropriate industry) to have worked with mainframes. I started in the heyday of the workstations (Sun, HP-UX, AIX, SGI) as a reaction to the annoyances of mainframes. Why pay for disk and compute access when you can have a workstation! Why have limited access to the system when you can have your own! Was the vibe. It is amusing/sad that in the AWS world we're right back to basicall…

Had the US government not forced IBM to get out of the centralized provision of computing by consent agreements and eventual divestiture, and had the US government not forbidden the Bell System to enter the centralized computing business by the FCCs Computer Inquiry 2, its likely that computing and networking would have evolved in a more rational way that did not include personal computing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Bureau_Corporation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Computer_Inquiry

It takes time and wastes effort, but technology eventually bests politicians.

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