YES BUT WHY IS THE FONT SO SMALL?
That's IBM's new 9-pixel type process.
IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe
91–100 of 104 posts
Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 PL/I is not totally out of date!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,…
Burroughs, being a stack machine, had MMU like qualities 'for free. Desktop got there 25 years later.
Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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,…
> Algol for B5000 Early in my career I wrote some Algol. So, got to love block structured languages and adopted the style of left margin indention then called publication Algol . I was on the computer selection committee at FedEx, and from what it had we were impressed with Algol, etc. So a Burroughs system is what we recommended and got. Alas, it was too slow. Soon the computing was way, way behind, and Big Blue got…
Many thanks for the history part.
I got introduced to computers with a Timex 2068 back in 1986, but as a language geek I always researched the old systems.
Additionally I managed to use a few languages of the Algol family for systems programing, hence strenghting my belief in safe systems programmin.
One of the best quotes I keep recalling is the Turing Award speech from Hoare, where he mentions his company customers were against having support to disable bounds checking in Algol compilers. Yet here we are.
Every time I check the CVE list I wish UNIX had never left AT&T labs.
Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe
#94Earlier 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.
You're thinking very much in terms of a PC architecture. Many components of the mainframe including a lot of the I/O hardware and some instructions in the assembly language itself are record oriented, and within reasonable limits operate on an entire record at once. It's not that big of a jump to go from entire records being atomic operations to at least speaking about entire transactions being the basic, atomic unit…
Define a record.
Also can you elaborate more on how ASM instructions can be record oriented?
Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe
#95Earlier 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…
I guess this this market of ultra-conservative customers are mostly US companies? I have hard time imagining companies in other countries getting into the habit of buying such kind if hardware?
Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're thinking very much in terms of a PC architecture. Many components of the mainframe including a lot of the I/O hardware and some instructions in the assembly language itself are record oriented, and within reasonable limits operate on an entire record at once. It's not that big of a jump to go from entire records being atomic operations to at least speaking about entire transactions being the basic, atomic unit…
Define a record. Also can you elaborate more on how ASM instructions can be record oriented?
Like a row in a table. I/O instructions in S/360 (as I recall) assembler would fetch an entire record in a single instruction / cycle (the I/O devices are radically different and would support this - it wasn't just syntactic sugar around reading a word or byte at a time). So the time to read in a record, perform some operations and write a record back out is actually much more predictable based on clock speed than it sounds like it would be to someone from a PC background.
Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I guess this this market of ultra-conservative customers are mostly US companies? I have hard time imagining companies in other countries getting into the habit of buying such kind if hardware?
I traveled all over the world while at IBM in the 1990s. They were doing a very nice business with the biggest banks in Europe as well as many of auto companies in Europe. Major ibm customers in Japan as well.
They wouldn't build these if they couldn't sell them. With the io and data flow rates these thing can handle, there really aren't alterntives on the market. the debate I keep spinning through in my head is will the market stop caring about the hardware (it's all just in the cloud or grid) before the mainframe goes away or will the cloud be partially mainframe.
Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Define a record. Also can you elaborate more on how ASM instructions can be record oriented?
Like a row in a table. I/O instructions in S/360 (as I recall) assembler would fetch an entire record in a single instruction / cycle (the I/O devices are radically different and would support this - it wasn't just syntactic sugar around reading a word or byte at a time). So the time to read in a record, perform some operations and write a record back out is actually much more predictable based on clock speed than it…
to the CPU, what's a row and what's a table in this context.
Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like a row in a table. I/O instructions in S/360 (as I recall) assembler would fetch an entire record in a single instruction / cycle (the I/O devices are radically different and would support this - it wasn't just syntactic sugar around reading a word or byte at a time). So the time to read in a record, perform some operations and write a record back out is actually much more predictable based on clock speed than it…
to the CPU, what's a row and what's a table in this context.
Row and table would be the database terminology. In mainframes you have records in datasets, but they're the same thing: tuples of fields. It's just that in a mainframe to maximize throughout a lot of the work like dealing with natively supported data formats is offloaded to special I/O controllers, which makes it easier to work with via low-level assembly instructions.
Re: IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe
#100Earlier 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 of many possible reasons is the way arrays are stored. In a matrix representation, should the memory be laid out one row at a time or one column at a time? It's mostly an arbitrary decision, but different languages have made differennt choices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-major_order explains it nicely.
If you wanted to take a native Fortran matrix and turn it into a native C matrix, you'd either need to copy everything to re-arrange the in-memory layout or do funky things with the indexing. Neither option is great.
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Bringing it back to a higher level, I'd agree that your point makes sense most of the time. In most cases, the cost of a memcpy(3) would be a rounding error. That's certainly the case for most web applications. In a tight loop in a math-heavy application, though, the standards are a bit higher.