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IBM Leaks Details on New Mainframe

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Fri Feb 22, 2008 05:25 PM
from the it's-all-about-the-benjamips dept.
IBM IT Hardware
Mark writes "Big Blue inadvertently revealed details about its new z10 Enterprise Class mainframe set to launch on Feb. 26, as well as details on z/OS v1.10, a new version of the mainframe OS due out in September. 'According to an internal IBM document obtained by SearchDataCenter.com, the z10 Enterprise Class will come in five different models and feature 64-way chips, compared with the 54-way z9 mainframes and earlier 32-way models. In a conference call last month, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge told investors that the z10 would have 50% more capacity, which indicates that it will probably tap out at around 27,000 million instructions per second (MIPS) at the top end, compared with about 18,000 MIPS on the previous z9 Enterprise Class.'"
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story

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Submission: IBM leaks details on new mainframe by BDPrime (1012761)
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  • Nah (Score:5, Funny)

    by dwalsh (87765) on Friday February 22 2008, @05:28PM (#22521592)
    I am not buying one till they get that OS up to 3.0 at least.
  • Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these. It would make my head explode.

  • This might be a dumb question... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TubeSteak (669689) on Friday February 22 2008, @05:34PM (#22521676) Journal
    How come they talk about thousands of MIPS instead of just saying GIPS?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Enleth (947766)
      It's probably for the same reason we talk about thousands of kilograms instead of "just" saying "gigagrams". The term "MIPS" is not really an abbreviation anymore, it became a proper word describing a performance unit everyone in the industry is used to.

      • Re:This might be a dumb question... (Score:4, Informative)

        by TheThiefMaster (992038) on Friday February 22 2008, @05:55PM (#22521950)

        It's probably for the same reason we talk about thousands of kilograms instead of "just" saying "gigagrams". The term "MIPS" is not really an abbreviation anymore, it became a proper word describing a performance unit everyone in the industry is used to.
        Actually "thousands of kilograms" would be "megagrams", but we generally call them "tonnes".

        • Re:This might be a dumb question... (Score:5, Funny)

          by QRDeNameland (873957) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:04PM (#22522068)

          Actually "thousands of kilograms" would be "megagrams", but we generally call them "tonnes".

          And from there it goes to kilotonnes and megatonnes, then I believe a thousand megatonnes is then commonly called a "shiteload" or, in the US, a "fuckload".

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Enleth (947766)
          Well, not enough coffe today, my bad. Megagrams, sure. However, the phrase "thousands of kilograms" actually IS used in speech instead of "tonnes" for some ranges, something like 1000-20000 kilograms, because it allows to express a precise, yet relatively significant mass in a more natural way when this precision matters (that is, most likely below 20t) - I'd rather say "eight thousand four hundred fifty-four kilograms" than "eight and four hundred fifty-four thousandths of a tonne".

          As an added benefit,

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Cheesey (70139)
        It's surprising that people are still using MIPS as a measurement! The (now very old) joke was that MIPS really stood for Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed, on account of the fact that it's highly dependant on how much you can actually do with each instruction, and also which instruction you are measuring. That dates back to the 80s at least, possibly the 70s, and it's why everyone should use representative benchmarks to compare CPUs rather than clock speeds and/or MIPS. The joke even made it into L

    • Re:This might be a dumb question... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by avalys (221114) on Friday February 22 2008, @05:55PM (#22521948)
      MIPS stands for millions of instructions per second, not mega-instructions per second. We'd have to talk about billions of instructions per second, or BIPS, and that sounds lame.

  • Low-End Port to PowerPC? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Friday February 22 2008, @05:38PM (#22521734) Homepage Journal
    These mainframes use the z6 CPU [wikipedia.org], which is closely related to the POWER6, which is closely related to the PowerPC.

    Is it at all possible to automatically port any nontrivial z6 software to PPC, if it doesn't require the actually different HW of the z6 (or its much higher performance)? Any possibility to run PPC SW on a z6, with some automatic porting for the higher performance?

    • Re:Low-End Port to PowerPC? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 (641858) on Friday February 22 2008, @05:55PM (#22521956) Homepage Journal
      The z6 isn't very similar to the POWER6. In the most important aspect with respect to porting software, namely the instruction set, they are completely different. The z6 instruction set is an incremental improvement on an architecture that goes back all the way to the 1960s with System/360 - the longest running architecture to maintain backwards compatibility. The POWER6 architecture is an incremental improvement on an architecture which dates back to the mid '90s and was designed from scratch around a completely different set of ideas.

      The things they share are not visible to the user as they are hidden behind the instruction decoder. You can see some evidence of the fact that IBM are trying to lower costs by sharing a lot of the design between the two lines though from certain new additions to the POWER instruction set, such as hardware support for Binary Coded Decimals (useful in high-throughput financial systems and present in the mainframe line since the 1401 and 700-series, which preceded System/360).

      • While the frontend may be rooted in the System/360 set, the driving force seems likely to be the same as all the Power6 systems. For example http://www.pseriestech.org/forum/articles/what-is-project-eclipz-112.html [pseriestech.org]

        Note the 'z' in eclipz. They seem to be seeking to consolidate their non-x86 offerings in terms of core component design.

        • Re:Except the processor... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by TheRaven64 (641858) on Friday February 22 2008, @07:31PM (#22522918) Homepage Journal
          I've seen that before, but the POWER6 is not the convergence chip. They share a lot, but it's stuff that matters from IBM's perspective (lowers development costs), not from their customers' perspectives (allows them to run the same software). That said, the biggest difference between the POWER6 and the z6 is the instruction decoder (addressing modes are easy to switch - look how many the Core 2 supports). Instruction decoders tend to take a roughly constant number of transistors. One of the big wins for RISC chips was that they could have simpler decoders and dedicate a lot more transistors to execution units. Now, the decoder has gone from being 50%+ of a CISC chip to under 10%.

          It wouldn't surprise me if the POWER7 either implements a superset of the POWER and System Z architectures, or has switchable decoders. Considering the fact that it's already possible to hot-plug CPUs on systems at this level, I can imagine a future IBM line where the hypervisor allows you to not only partition the system, but also decide which chips run in POWER and which in System Z mode dynamically, migrating virtual machines and restarting CPUs as required. That could be very attractive for customers wanting to consolidate mainframe, AIX, and Linux systems.

          One of the design goals of the PowerPC instruction set (a superset of which is implemented by the POWER6) was to easily emulate x86. It would be really interesting if IBM would enhance this emulation support into the hypervisor, allowing customers to run legacy x86 Linux, Solaris or Windows Terminal Server virtual machines on their mainframes.

          By the way, this mainframe is one of the big reasons why IBM are so keen on open source. If you run Linux and (portable) open source software then IBM can sell you a mainframe running Linux VMs when you start to outgrow your current infrastructure. The reason IBM owns so much of the (small, but incredibly lucrative) mainframe market was that in the '60s they pushed the predecessors to this system - System/360. They sold cheap minicomputers and high-end mainframes that ran exactly the same applications (and, with System/370, the mainframe could even run virtual minicomputers). They got people using the cheap minis and then presented them with a clear upgrade path. With open source, they can give people a really long upgrade path starting at commodity hardware and going as far up as they want.

  • n-way (Score:3, Funny)

    by Shotgun (30919) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:12PM (#22522170)
    Damn. I never ask for enough. There I was, happy for a 3-way.

  • Naming (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer (95088) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:16PM (#22522220) Homepage Journal
    They should call them something like "mega-servers" instead of "mainframes". They might sell more that way. Hmmm.....iFrame?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by PCM2 (4486)
      The name of the product is not as much the stumbling block as is the price. In fact, many (if not most) mainframes are not sold at all, but leased.

  • Mainframes still around (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Danathar (267989) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:18PM (#22522244) Journal
    My first two real jobs were as a Computer operator on an old Burroughs system and Sperry/Unisys system. What I find really interesting is how mainframes have really benefited from the same technology that made microcomputers fast. There was a period where clustering PC's (Servers) really was much more cost effective, but as we move into the future the robustness and bulletproof downtime of those old mainframe OS's have been given new life with lightning fast hardware and I/O subsystems.

  • Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer (95088) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:31PM (#22522366) Homepage Journal
    I for one welcome our big and fast Cobol overlords.

  • And we just upgraded last month (Score:5, Funny)

    by jocknerd (29758) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:47PM (#22522510)
    I guess the IBM rep forgot to mention that a new one was one the way.

  • Inadvertent (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ShinmaWa (449201) on Saturday February 23 2008, @12:51AM (#22524760)
    ...my ass.

    That's called marketing son. It comes out in 4 days and they are creating hype for it.

    (NOTE: The inadvertent part was completely fabricated by Slashdot. Not even the article makes this claim.)

    • Considering a single modern quad core Pentium has about twice the processing power as this mainframe.
      You are kidding, right? These systems are massively parallel machines, and are frequently used these days to present dozens of operating system images running concurrently. They support nifty ideas like instant failover and clustering on one machine, with arbitrary SMP to scale up performance as necessary.

    • Re:Kinda slow, eh? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 (641858) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:06PM (#22522110) Homepage Journal

      Considering a single modern quad core Pentium has about twice the processing power as this mainframe
      Uh, what? Currently, the fastest CPU you can buy is the POWER6. This mainframe uses the the z6 CPU, which is effectively a POWER6 with a different instruction decoder and MMU, and it supports up to 64 of them. They are connected via an SMP hub chip which adds 24MB of shared level 3 cache.

      They also support partitioning on the hardware level, so you can run z/OS or Linux virtual machines with almost no overhead (something you've been able to do since it was called System/370). You also have a huge amount more fault tolerance with a system like this (take a look at how many transistors on the CPUs are dedicated to error checking, and then start looking at the peripheral systems).

      • Re:Kinda slow, eh? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Marnhinn (310256) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:22PM (#22522278) Homepage Journal
        I work currently in an organization that uses mainframes. They are the z9 series - and honestly are some of the most useful things.

        We use them due to ability operate in something called a sysplex. A sysplex is when multiple mainframes share data (known as DASD) and work together. When a mainframe is in a sysplex, you can do all sorts of things to the machine without having to bring your application down. These range from whole operating system upgrades to hardware maintenance and the end user will never see the impact. A sysplex literally is designed to be a 24x7 operation.

        You can buy other types of machines that will be more powerful, faster or do operation x better, but it is hard to find a set of machines that are as stable and reliable as a mainframe is (and process millions of transactions per second).

        Also, in terms of virtualization - a single mainframe on z/Linux can host many virtual linux servers - enough that you can save a substantial amount on power costs (my org estimated 400k a year in savings in terms of power alone - if the linux servers that are hosted individually on one of our distributed networks went to virtual on a mainframe).
        • Mainframes could share DASD *long* before the introduction of sysplex. Now - *parallel* sysplex, that's different - that's shared memory for things like DB2 lock structures, etc.

          I'm a mainframer from way back and I've got the grey hair to prove it. :)

      • Re:Kinda slow, eh? (Score:5, Funny)

        by edibobb (113989) on Friday February 22 2008, @07:33PM (#22522938) Homepage
        Z6 is nothing. I've used a Z80 before.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by rbanffy (584143)
            Shouldn't the branch predictor be different since the instruction set is different? Or it does its magic on the micro-instruction level (if there is one in P6 and z6)?

            BTW, the first message was kind of a joke. It is possible to make more or less the same chip look like a few different ones by changing just a few small parts.

            IIRC, there is a company being sued by IBM for making custom-microcode-Itanic-based servers that look too much like IBM mainframes.

    • Re:Kinda slow, eh? (Score:5, Informative)

      by dreamchaser (49529) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:15PM (#22522212) Homepage Journal
      You don't get out much do you? Mainframes are going strong in data centers that need high availability, fault tolerant, error correcting, massively parallel systems. There is also a LOT of old code that is still going strong on them. Their inherent ability to run multiple virtualized OSes is another strong suit.

      Your math is also way off if you think 4 x86 cores outperform this. I'll leave you to do the proper calculations as your homework.

    • Re:Kinda slow, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dedazo (737510) on Friday February 22 2008, @06:45PM (#22522492) Journal
      The day you can use commodity hardware to build a failover-capable sysplex running multiple instances of an OS that can run 30-year old COBOL applications that do millions of financial transactions per minute with absolute 24/7/365 uptime, you'll be a very rich man indeed.

      In the mean time, IBM, Hitachi and a few others will be raking it in for you.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by lgw (121541)
        Google style clustering, where you know some of your hardware will fail from time to time and you're just OK with that, is the first promising alternative to mainframe uptimes since the days of VMS clusters. The best hardware from Sun or HP never came close.

        The thing is, it's really hard to write code for a "soft cluster". Being fault-tolerant in your software instead of your hardware is decidedly non-trivial. With a mainframe you just write a check with enough 0s. That's very appealing unless, like Goo

        • Re:Kinda slow, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ben there... (946946) on Friday February 22 2008, @08:53PM (#22523490) Journal

          Google style clustering, where you know some of your hardware will fail from time to time and you're just OK with that, is the first promising alternative to mainframe uptimes since the days of VMS clusters.
          Why should Google care? They can't provide "wrong" search results because of failure. Only out-of-date or not-so-great search results.

          Their internal "bigtable" distributed database sounds like it needs better accuracy, but not their actual product.

        • Re:Once again Apple did it first. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by HoboMaster (639861) on Saturday February 23 2008, @12:33AM (#22524684)
          Yes, because you obsessively checking the apple.com site is proof that they're stable enough to run enormous and essential financial databases. Like parent said, there are a lot of transactions per second happening on this thing and they can't afford for it to mess up ever.

          As far as using COBOL, it's because these programs are likely older than you.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by FlyingGuy (989135)

        Yes, it IS really that easy. The cooling lines are all quick disconnect and you literally shove a module ( about the size of a typical intel box ) into an empty bay, and the system will POST, recognize and begin assigning work to another 64 processors. I have seen it with my own eyes, and it is just insanely cool!

        I know a lot of /.rs are to young to remember VM / PROFS and stuff like that. VM will let you run just about any operating system as a "Guest OS" and that is some cool shit.

        • Re:bang for the buck isn't there (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ToasterMonkey (467067) on Saturday February 23 2008, @12:09AM (#22524584) Homepage
          Performance isn't the only issue at hand here. There's also reliability, integration, management, etc. I'm not intimately familiar with IBM mainframe technology, but I've learned enough from people who are to know these are incredibly reliable, and trusted machines. That's why they are used in financial industries, not merely their ability to handle large loads.

          If you were to suggest to to a mainframe guy that he needs to upgrade to a cluster of Unix boxes, you'd get the same look you'd give someone suggesting you should upgrade to a rack of Dell servers. You all think the others are f'ing nuts for different reasons.

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