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IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

www-03.ibm.com

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Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#41

Post by chime »

ivansavz wrote: post #31

The part about the in-memory analytics reminds me a lot of the SAP HANA spiel: Transaction Database --> copy --> analytics db = slow In-memory transactions with built-in analytics = fast I totally understand the value of analytics and BI applications, but does it all have to be realtime? And what "mobile analytics" are they going to compute exactly? Forget analytics, I can tell you what mobile users are doing right n…

Their customers are not King.com or most techie startups. Their customers are insurance companies, banks, and other financial behemoths.

My bank recently alerted me because I swiped my credit card at one gas station away from home but did not buy gas (the pump was out of gas) and then swiped again at another gas station in a 3mi radius within 30 minutes (obviously since I needed gas).

Their system picked up these two transactions, figured out they were both gas stations, geo-located them to be out of my area, calculated the distance to be close enough to reason it was just one person (and not my wife using her card elsewhere), and triggered an alert because the first transaction was really just a $1 pre-auth with no actual charge.

While none of this is really that complex if you built a fraud-detection system from ground up with these requirements, imagine running this rule on a few hundred million transactions per day. Now add in a thousand more fraud-detection rules, scoring algorithms, and pattern recognition for uncommon usage. Then hook it up to the mobile app to further reduce chances of fraudulent usage by tracking user's location, businesses silently checked-in, and alert preferences. IBM is targeting companies that need this.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#43

Post by [deleted] »

m_mueller wrote: post #28
jlarocco wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. > Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), a vector processing model providing instruction level parallelism, to speed workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling. For example, COBOL 5.2 and PL/I 4.5 exploit SIMD and improved floating point enhancements to deliver improved performance over and above that provided by the faster processor.…

> I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. Well they are. These things are built for a specific audience and it so happens that they are still willing to spend money on this, otherwise it wouldn't be made, especially not by IBM that is otherwise quick to disband business units that don't make heaps of money. In my research I'm using an even older language: Fortran. Believe it or not, but…

[deleted]

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#44

Post by gaadd33 »

m_mueller wrote: post #28
jlarocco wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. > Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), a vector processing model providing instruction level parallelism, to speed workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling. For example, COBOL 5.2 and PL/I 4.5 exploit SIMD and improved floating point enhancements to deliver improved performance over and above that provided by the faster processor.…

> I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. Well they are. These things are built for a specific audience and it so happens that they are still willing to spend money on this, otherwise it wouldn't be made, especially not by IBM that is otherwise quick to disband business units that don't make heaps of money. In my research I'm using an even older language: Fortran. Believe it or not, but…

To be fair, anyone who uses numpy or scipy ends up using Fortran even if they don't know it. A lot of scientific libraries have been ultra optimized for Fortran.

I'm sure optimized libraries could be written in any language, however the vast number of researchers have decided that Fortran is by far more accurate and faster (for these libraries) so they go with that.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#45

Post by halayli »

jacquesm wrote: post #35
halayli wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that but this is a very general definition of TPS. How many CPU cycles a transaction requires? It varies on the transaction of course. So I am wondering why they use TPS as a unit when it can be anything.

They use TPS as a unit because that's how large banks and other transaction oriented entities do their provisioning and capacity planning. That's their 'unit', not CPU cycles.

But how can they claim they can do X transactions when a transaction's processing requirement is undefined?

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#46

Post by m_mueller »

gaadd33 wrote: post #44
m_mueller wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. Well they are. These things are built for a specific audience and it so happens that they are still willing to spend money on this, otherwise it wouldn't be made, especially not by IBM that is otherwise quick to disband business units that don't make heaps of money. In my research I'm using an even older language: Fortran. Believe it or not, but…

To be fair, anyone who uses numpy or scipy ends up using Fortran even if they don't know it. A lot of scientific libraries have been ultra optimized for Fortran. I'm sure optimized libraries could be written in any language, however the vast number of researchers have decided that Fortran is by far more accurate and faster (for these libraries) so they go with that.

> optimized libraries could be written in any language

Well, at least in anything that has really performant compilers. That's currently true for C, Fortran and Assembly, to some extent also C++. Between the first three, Fortran is by far the easiest to use for numerics - its syntax is in fact not much more difficult than Matlab. It's clunky in anything but numerical code (such as when you try to create a nice API or when you try to have generic methods), but at the end it still wins.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#47

Post by Someone »

halayli wrote: post #45
jacquesm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use TPS as a unit because that's how large banks and other transaction oriented entities do their provisioning and capacity planning. That's their 'unit', not CPU cycles.

But how can they claim they can do X transactions when a transaction's processing requirement is undefined?

There are industry-standard benchmarks that measure TPS. See for example (or maybe not even for example; it may be effectively the only one in town) http://www.tpc.org/information/benchmarks.asp.

And of course, anybody considering buying such a machine will spend quite a bit on evaluating how it performs under their load, just like SPEC (https://www.spec.org/) says something, but not all.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#48

Post by halayli »

Someone wrote: post #47
halayli wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how can they claim they can do X transactions when a transaction's processing requirement is undefined?

There are industry-standard benchmarks that measure TPS. See for example (or maybe not even for example; it may be effectively the only one in town) http://www.tpc.org/information/benchmarks.asp . And of course, anybody considering buying such a machine will spend quite a bit on evaluating how it performs under their load, just like SPEC ( https://www.spec.org/ ) says something, but not all.

I've looked at the tpc.org maybe 13 years ago. It never made sense to me to use it as a measurement unit back then and it still don't make sense to me now. :)

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#49

Post by [deleted] »

Someone wrote: post #47
halayli wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how can they claim they can do X transactions when a transaction's processing requirement is undefined?

There are industry-standard benchmarks that measure TPS. See for example (or maybe not even for example; it may be effectively the only one in town) http://www.tpc.org/information/benchmarks.asp . And of course, anybody considering buying such a machine will spend quite a bit on evaluating how it performs under their load, just like SPEC ( https://www.spec.org/ ) says something, but not all.

[deleted]

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#50

Post by pjmlp »

graycat wrote: post #30
jlarocco wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe. > Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), a vector processing model providing instruction level parallelism, to speed workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling. For example, COBOL 5.2 and PL/I 4.5 exploit SIMD and improved floating point enhancements to deliver improved performance over and above that provided by the faster processor.…

In about 1993 or so, at IBM, PL/I was being supported by just one guy! If they have a new release, then they may have put some more people on it! PL/I is not totally out of date! E.g., it has some really sweetheart scope of names rules. The On Conditions are generally nicer than Try-Catch, e.g., if in a code block A and do a Goto out of it to a statement label in a containing code block B (it's fair to call PL/I a bl…

> It's been said that the golden age of language design was the 1960s. C was designed after PL/I and was a really big step down so that it could compile on a DEC mini-computer with 8 KB of main memory while PL/I always had at least 64 KB.

UNIX's success in the market brought C upon us.

Actually it was a very big step down, not only in terms of what other systems programming languages of the same era were capable of, but also in terms of security and compiler research.

One just has to look at PL/I, PL/M, Algol 68, Mesa and then to C.

Just as an example, Algol for B5000 systems (1961) already had the distinction between safe and unsafe code, with unsafe program modules requiring some form of "root" access. Sounds familiar?

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