Fwd: Re: Room for Collections - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

22 Aug 2001

On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Kent Borg wrote:

...
  On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 06:10:37PM -0400, Master of
all that Sucks wrote:
  I think the distinction between supercomputers
and mainframes is even
 deeper than that.  Supercomputers are designed to do things very very
 fast.  Mainframes are designed to do many many things at once.  The two
 goals frequently aren't convergent.  
 Very much so.  Maybe a supercomputer is to a dragster as a mainframe
 is to an 18-wheeler.  Both might have roughly the same magnatude
 engine with the dragster doing somewhat more power (I am making this
 up--don't fault me on the specifics), but the intended uses are very
 different. 
Your analogy is quite good.  If we continue this analogy, we can say that
your proverbial dragster has a lot more horsepower than the
tractor-trailer, and the semi has a lot more torque than the dragster.  
You could force a supercomputer to act like a mainframe, or vice versa,
but it wouldn't work very well.

...
   Mainframes are
very good at serving thousands, if not hundreds of
 thousands of *simultaneous* transactions.  
 Yes, though earlier mainframes were doing batch jobs with cards and
 later mag tape.  But always mainframes are big iron for business and
 that makes them very different from the shortlived big thoroughbred
 iron of supercomputers. 
They were still sitting there chugging away doing many simultaneous (not
very quickly) with data obtained from mag tape or punched card.  There
were, of course exceptions to this paradigm, but I still think it's a good
way of looking at it.

...
  -kb, the micro-oriented Kent who used to be puzzled
over what made
 mainframes different, and though he still doesn't know that much about
 mainframe architecture, he at least understands their function is
 quite different.

Peace...  Sridhar