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IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

www-03.ibm.com

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Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#71

Post by fragmede »

drKarl wrote: post #59

While it's an undeniable technological achievement, I don't think it's a good strategical one. Nowadays you don't create a single monolithic system, really expensive too, which is capable of processing all of your transactions, as it says, like 100 cybermondays every day. Instead, you have a distributed system, with many cheap, geographically distributed servers, each one capable of a much lower number of transaction…

You say that as if managing a system at Google or AWS or Facebook scale is free. The downtime of individual servers may not matter as much in that architecture, but they each have an army of (costly!) engineers just to keep things running.

To say that the Google 'many-servers' approach is the only valid one is to overstate the trade-offs.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#73

Post by easytiger »

> z13 is the first system to make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale

Or you know, any kind of transaction because there is no difference.

Fuck I hate marketing.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#74

Post by feld »

The "encryption" buzzword is worthless without details. And I wonder if they'll stand behind their product if their crypto flavor of choice is broken and needs to be changed. Otherwise that's an expensive brick of swiss cheese.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#75

Post by [deleted] »

qznc wrote: post #69
wmf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the previous generation: "IBM doesn’t publish prices for mainframes but the word on the street is that it is around $80,000 per core for a [Linux/Java core] compared to $400,000 per core for regular [cores] that mostly run z/OS" http://www.enterprisetech.com/2013/10/09/ibm-slashes-hardwar... I'm not sure whether that's the amortized total price or just the activation after you've already bought the machine.

Also the per-core licence is not the only position. You have to add a maintenance contract, buying the machine, firmware licence (which in this case is afaik a big Java application running on its own core), OS licence, setup, and probably more. This really is a cashcow of IBM, mostly because they own the "mainframe" trademark/monopoly and everybody who wants to sell a "mainframe" is sued out of the market. Without th…

[deleted]

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#76

Post by dfox »

aries1980 wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #14

I've found some specs: - up to 141 configurable processors - new 22nm 8-core processor chip@5GHZ - 110GIPS - Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) support - On chip cryptographic and compression coprocessors - up to 10 TB of memory (configured as 'memory raid', RAIM) PDF is here: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/zs/en/zsd03035usen/...

110 GIPS is not too much for 141 CPU. My Core i7 4700HQ CPU dos 3 GIPS/core at 2.9 GHz.

It depends on what kinds of instructions you count. I strongly suspect that your 3GIps number is only register-to-register integer arithmetic, while the 110GIps is some IBM-ish "mixed workload" that uses most of the System/z instruction set. (which includes things like "get CRC32 of this buffer" as one instruction)

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#77

Post by ch_123 »

Normati wrote: post #58
m_mueller wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not just learnability. In some cases, Fortran can be considered to be faster than C since it can apply something like -fno-strict-alisasing by default. Yes. In my experience, you can make C as fast as Fortran, but it will be a lot more work (and you need more knowledge about the machine). Fortran's defaults are very strong when it comes to crunching numbers as quickly as possible. Multidimensional arrays with…

I always wonder why you can't just add a library to another language to get most of the features of somebody else's favorite language. If not a library, couldn't any other language add matlab style matrices and end up being as good as it, fortran, etc? Do we really need a whole different language with a whole different set of arbitrary rules just so a few features are easier or faster?

One disadvantage of libraries is that the compiler treats them as regular code. If something is baked into the language, the compiler and run time (if any) can reason about particular operations and optimize them.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#78

Post by dfox »

drKarl wrote: post #59

While it's an undeniable technological achievement, I don't think it's a good strategical one. Nowadays you don't create a single monolithic system, really expensive too, which is capable of processing all of your transactions, as it says, like 100 cybermondays every day. Instead, you have a distributed system, with many cheap, geographically distributed servers, each one capable of a much lower number of transaction…

These things tend to be used nowadays as the single source of truth in middle of large distributed systems. When your data represent real value you really need full transactional semantics and when your transactional volume is large enough, buying or renting System z is the cheapest solution.

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#79

Post by gojock »

aries1980 wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #14

I've found some specs: - up to 141 configurable processors - new 22nm 8-core processor chip@5GHZ - 110GIPS - Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) support - On chip cryptographic and compression coprocessors - up to 10 TB of memory (configured as 'memory raid', RAIM) PDF is here: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/zs/en/zsd03035usen/...

110 GIPS is not too much for 141 CPU. My Core i7 4700HQ CPU dos 3 GIPS/core at 2.9 GHz.

yes but buying 3 of them gets you 3 machines that can do 3GIPS, not one machine that can do 9GIPS

Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

#80

Post by m_mueller »

Normati wrote: post #58
m_mueller wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not just learnability. In some cases, Fortran can be considered to be faster than C since it can apply something like -fno-strict-alisasing by default. Yes. In my experience, you can make C as fast as Fortran, but it will be a lot more work (and you need more knowledge about the machine). Fortran's defaults are very strong when it comes to crunching numbers as quickly as possible. Multidimensional arrays with…

I always wonder why you can't just add a library to another language to get most of the features of somebody else's favorite language. If not a library, couldn't any other language add matlab style matrices and end up being as good as it, fortran, etc? Do we really need a whole different language with a whole different set of arbitrary rules just so a few features are easier or faster?

For Fortran style multidimensional arrays, libraries fly right out the window. First of all, you need slicing syntax and operators baked into the language. The compiler needs to be aware of the array's storage order, such that it can implement operations like A + B optimally for A, B as n-dimensional arrays. Then it needs to be aware of their boundaries, such that it can align the memory optimally.

So that leaves language level support. So far the only contender that I can see coming up is Julia - and it will take a lot of effort until it can reach performance levels on par with Fortran. This basically would require a big push by one of the big software companies - who all aren't making a lot of money in HPC software anymore. I could see Nvidia picking up the ball at some point, it would suit them well - but then we're getting into vendor lock-in again.

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