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Mainframes Find New Life in AI Era (msn.com) 56

Posted by msmash from the second-life dept.
Mainframe computers, stalwarts of high-speed data processing, are finding new relevance in the age of AI. Banks, insurers, and airlines continue to rely on these industrial-strength machines for mission-critical operations, with some now exploring AI applications directly on the hardware, WSJ reported in a feature story. IBM, commanding over 96% of the mainframe market, reported 6% growth in its mainframe business last quarter. The company's latest zSystem can process up to 30,000 transactions per second and hold 40 terabytes of data. WSJ adds: Globally, the mainframe market was valued at $3.05 billion in 2023, but new mainframe sales are expected to decline through 2028, IDC said. Of existing mainframes, however, 54% of enterprise leaders in a 2023 Forrester survey said they would increase their usage over the next two years.

Mainframes do have limitations. They are constrained by the computing power within their boxes, unlike the cloud, which can scale up by drawing on computing power distributed across many locations and servers. They are also unwieldy -- with years of old code tacked on -- and don't integrate well with new applications. That makes them costly to manage and difficult to use as a platform for developing new applications.
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Mainframes Find New Life in AI Era More

Mainframes Find New Life in AI Era

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  • Not so much (Score:3)

    by larwe ( 858929 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @09:45AM (#64685018)
    Extant mainframes weren't designed for the specific compute needs of "AI". Either they're going to run INCREDIBLY - OUTSTANDINGLY power inefficient code on ancient metal, or they're going to staple new hardware onto their mainframe and call it an "AI mainframe".

    • Re:Not so much (Score:5, Insightful)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @10:51AM (#64685202) Journal

      Either they're going to run INCREDIBLY - OUTSTANDINGLY power inefficient code on ancient metal

      Ancient? The last "non AI" IBM mainframe, the z15 was released in 2019. The newer z16 does indeed have hardware accelerators for AI, specifically a bunch of special purpose hardware for matrix multiplies, convolution, certain other mathematical ops which are popular. "Stapled on" I mean kinda, but IBM have been integrating high speed, low latency accelerators deeply into their mainframes for decades, formerly things like databases, Java, XML, cryptography and compression. I think rapidly shuffling vast amounts of data vrom various sources to various application specific accelerators is kind of their jam.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        Is there a "CobolGPT"?

        • I think that's going to take a while. There's OO COBOL already, so we first need Functional COBOL. Then COBOL running on "Web3" blockchains. And only then GPT COBOL. (-:

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      Ancient metal? Who is running ancient metal? The current generation of mainframes is 2 years old, and includes dedicated AI inference hardware on each chip.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by cstacy ( 534252 )

        Ancient metal? Who is running ancient metal? The current generation of mainframes is 2 years old, and includes dedicated AI inference hardware on each chip.

        Didn't you even read TFS? It says they use "tacked on" ancient code that cannot be maintained. The AI is written in COBOL back in 1972, and it's going to be very expensive to find programmers.


        MOVE HYPE TO AI-BUBBLE.
        COLLECT UNDERPANTS.
        INFERENCE PROFITS.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by gtall ( 79522 )

          What are you talking about? The "AI" was not written in Cobol, it did not exist back then. Apps were written in Cobol. These days, apps are written in more modern languages. So how come they cannot just compile AI apps for the mainframes? It isn't like they are doing anything deeply mysterious, just process a lot of numbers.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cstacy ( 534252 )

            What are you talking about? The "AI" was not written in Cobol, it did not exist back then.

            Umm, I was there. Does anyone on Slashdot understand humor, if it's not marked with a /s or whatever? When did reading comprehension get so bad? Get off my lawn!

      • Ancient metal? Who is running ancient metal?

        Iron Maiden?

    • Extant mainframes weren't designed for the specific compute needs of "AI". Either they're going to run INCREDIBLY - OUTSTANDINGLY power inefficient code on ancient metal, or they're going to staple new hardware onto their mainframe and call it an "AI mainframe".

      They're still making new mainframes... you know, the big expandable frames with the highly integrated general purpose and special purpose hardware all in one unit? They absolutely can run specialized hardware, it's what they do.

    • Some of these massively large systems can handle many many PCIE slots with thousands of PCIE lanes. If you want a single Linux image with hundreds of GPUs all attached with memory-speed available to the OS, this might just be the platform to try. Mainframes are designed to handle the IO.

    • Modern mainframes are manufactured with tech that is the same or even exeeds that of modern servers.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      The mainframe (zSystems) that IBM sells are just Linux clusters with some amazingly high-availability features such as entire board, CPU and RAM hot swapping. These days the workloads are all run in a container-like system anyway. Modern mainframes are basically a cluster but you have unlimited resources on both hardware and software to make sure it is completely redundant and 'never crashes' because of hardware issues.

      You can do a lot of these things on Intel systems that you take off the shelf as well, eg

      • Mainframes are more than "just linux clusters with HA". People who want to learn more should read a bit more about mainframes and in particular about the IBM Z and the Telum CPU, for instance from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/do... [ieee.org], that is used in those systems. And yes, a mainframe can run "Linux on zSystems", but most companies buy them to run z/OS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS), sometimes keeping some special applications on an Linux on Z LPAR. It is indeed possible to do a lot with HA clusters, bu

        • oh... let's also mention backward compatibility... There is very good software written out there that does not need to be changed and that perhaps will never need to be changed as long as there is hardware to run it, and z/OS is backwards compatible (including binary compatible) with decades ago systems (for some applications, binary compatibility can go back to 1964, except in the case of rare CICS macros that can be modified or software emulated).

  • Mainframes do have limitations. They are constrained by the computing power within their boxes, unlike the cloud, which can scale up by drawing on computing power distributed across many locations and servers. They are also unwieldy -- with years of old code tacked on -- and don't integrate well with new applications. That makes them costly to manage and difficult to use as a platform for developing new applications.

    I don't quite get this. I thought you could run Linux on them and if so, why would they not be treatable as any other Linux server?

    • Re:Mainstream Mainframe? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @10:04AM (#64685082) Homepage Journal

      It's bullshit. You can write new applications for mainframes just fine. If you've got a mess of hacked-up legacy software on your mainframe, that's on you as well. You can do the same thing on a regular server (or PC for that matter).

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by larwe ( 858929 )
        You can write anything on a Turing complete machine. But - AI workloads won't run efficiently on a general purpose CPU. So yeah sure you can AI a mainframe but it will be orders of magnitude less efficient than GPU AI compute, and probably one or two more orders of magnitude less efficient than an ASIC/ASSP.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by _merlin ( 160982 )

          Sure, but that isn't what the article is saying. The article is an incoherent mess of buzzwords.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gtall ( 79522 )

          We have no Turing complete machines. Look up the definition, they need an infinite amount of tape. Last we checked, memory in our machines is finite.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by narcc ( 412956 )

            Nonsense.

            To be Turning complete does not require infinite memory, it's requires unbounded memory. Also, just having unbounded memory is not sufficient. For example, push down automata have unbounded memory but are not Turing complete. This is CS 101.

            We absolutely do have Turing complete machines. You're sitting in front of one right now. We know that it's Turing complete because it can simulate a universal Turing machine. Given sufficient time and resources it can compute anything that is computable.

    • And I woudl image it easier to add high performance concentrated AI co-processing to a mainframe than to get similar results from AI compute distributed in a server cloud.
  • ...and they had to call the VAXorcist [gnu.org]

  • Same Old, Same Old (Score:4)

    by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @10:25AM (#64685122) Journal

    I've been hearing predictions about the imminent death of the mainframe since the 80's. I'll bet that I'll continue to hear that mainframes are sure to go extinct well into my eighties.

  • Mainframes are either the standard or the results of which concerning all things microcomputing. Vacuum tubes (really!), solid state circuits, the asymmetric memory channels, processes, interprocess communications,..... All developed with mainframes as the target. And most before the modern mainframes were even a standard.

  • hold 40 terabytes of data (Score:3)

    by 0xG ( 712423 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @10:42AM (#64685168)

    hold 40 terabytes of data

    If I stuff all five drive bays on my tower PC with 8TB EVO SSDs, I have a mainframe!

  • Why are they called Mainframes ?

    $stty -echo

  • We are in an AI hype. The hype will die and the rather mediocre actual advances are not enough to qualify as an "era".

    • Some people still think 3D printing will change something. Let them live in their fantasy world.

    • The use case in the story actually makes perfect sense:

      Banks, insurance providers and airlines are a few of the big industries that still rely on the mainframe for high-speed data processing. And now, some are looking to apply AI to their transaction data at the hardware source, rather than in the cloud.

      For banks, analyzing potentially fraudulent transactions must be accomplished in milliseconds. "You canâ(TM)t go off to the cloud, go do a search, go do a generative AI query, because it will just ti

  • Mainframes are useful, expensive, powerful I/O machines. They were doing visualization properly before it was a thing anywhere else. They are superb for running old, working code for many decades. IBM has been busy adding new features so keep their existing customers, and it seems to be working: most of their existing customers are probably not going to get rid of them, despite the ongoing expense. The real question is whether IBM can attract new customers. What is the value proposition to get a mainframe f
  • Now everything is getting a new life. Robots have changed everything. I was looking for information about the recommendation system, found an article about the ai recommendation engine [ddi-dev.com] and I was not surprised. AI is everywhere now. I hope there will be no crisis.

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