29 Apr
2002
29 Apr
'02
3:35 p.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: Raymond Moyers [mailto:rmoyers@nop.org]
They don't pay those costly License fees and
support contracts
out of ignorance. todays mainframes are exteamly muscular,
having taken advantage of the same technical advancements
Indeed. I would probably buy one regardless of the cost that the
power bill would cause me. :)
Well, i had assumed most would know that a box that
typically
served 5000 seats or more was powerfull even as most might
not know what it is that really sets these things apart.
That's exactly where the misunderstanding came in, I think. It's
taken as obvious, for the most part, but your statement that the
entire campus full of hardware would be emulated on a single peesee
seemed to say differently.
At any rate, it makes much more sense now.
Channel I/O for example, translating to terms and
concepts
more familiar to those without OPER console time, imagine a
"PC" where every orifice was pumped by its own dedicated
DMA controller, where you can have 65535 of these devices.
and fill em all up with no load on the CPU.
Not having much time on mainframe systems, myself, I still imagined
something like this, and you can pretty much infer it from talk of
the things.
Remember when the mickysoft press release parroting
nattering
nabob computer press was declaring the death of the mainframe ?
They're not still doing it? That surprises me.
and very humorous events like when the idiot press
would read a
product release about NT being ported to an FSIOP card, and run
to print "NT Ported to the mainframe ! "
I would like to see that, actually -- the article, I mean.
VM/NT -- Heh. I wonder what the "error number" is for all of the
NT IOPs in the machine simultaneously jumbling up their RAM.
A FSIOP card, File Server I/O Processor, is a PC on
a card that
plugs into the mainframe so that it can share mainframe DASD
(disk) or have a faster channel for I/O to PC based middleware,
it certainly isn't NT running on the mainframe in the manner
the hapless readers of these sorry articles was led to believe.
I suppose such a product would be good if you need it. It could do
better than to run NT. Maybe they should "port CP/M" to the mainframe.
As for CPU power, PC's are certainly as fast per
CPU in a general
sense as a mainframe, but without the I/O capacity could never
hope to replace a mainframe anytime soon.
I don't know exact numbers, but honestly, the CPU in a modern peesee isn't
the weak spot at all. Generally there's some kind of bottleneck (or five)
that needs repaired in the design.
The PC running something decent does rival the power
of a
mainframe or a supercomputer of yesterday however,
I wouldn't doubt that it might compare for certain (probably single-user)
non-io-bound applications. I'm not sure I can make that conclusion for
a supercomputer at all. When is "yesterday" in this context? :)
utter garbage that at last time i checked w2k needed
64megs
of ram for the installer to run ? how absurd !
Actually, I'd have expected it to need more than that.
Compare with the size of bsd/linux/unix that will
still run on
a machine with 4megs or compare with a mainframe nucleus
and you see that they on the other hand, have stayed small
tight and fast. and assembler is still very mainstream
on the mainframe where thruput of massive loads is still
the focus.
Your comment about mainframes having "stayed small" is oddly amusing,
but perhaps it's because I got no sleep yesterday.
mips or so emulating 360/70/90 instructions is
testament
that the lowly PC has become very muscular in its own right.
Indeed. I'm sure there are some tasks to which a peesee is well suited,
but the problem is -- aside from the common operating environment --
the baggage in the design, still hanging around from the beginning.
(probably not too well-thought-out back then ;) They probably should have
done something ground-up by now to take advantage of newer cores, bus
technology, etc.
Chris
Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL
/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl
Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'