I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe.
Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), a vector processing
model providing instruction level parallelism, to speed
workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling.
For example, COBOL 5.2 and PL/I 4.5 exploit SIMD and
improved floating point enhancements to deliver improved
performance over and above that provided by the faster
processor.
Most people would consider COBOL and PL/I to be laughably out of date languages from the 60s and 70s. But here's a new machine with 10 TB of RAM, and the release notes are quick to point out new features for COBOL and PL/I. Go figure.
I am on an iSeries, the little brother to the z. We have a pair of zSeries as well. COBOL and RPG (its fully free form by the way, looks like any other language) are both very much rooted in business logic, in particular math. Their number handling is well known and without inconsistencies of many newer languages. That and the code base is well established and works. Throw in that memory leaks are nearly non existent, code is independent of changes to the microprocessors and your investment always comes forward.
Seriously, we have code whose originals can be traced to systems long dead. Yet code is not stagnate, full SQL integration exists for most language, there are many ways to get to the web. That and you would be surprised at the number of companies who use these machines simply for one reason above all, reliability. Our last crash was a site failure and even then we rolled to the DR site instantly.
I've been lucky enough to do an internship in banking, where Cobol is (and I guess will be for the foreseable future) the core language.
I didn't have to write lots of Cobol, but it's been very educational: both its very rigorous syntax (and number handling as you said!) and the fact that the code I was modifying had been written even before I was born.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Cobol in itself is not a bad language at all! Mainframes are obviously rock solid and for development purposes, open source implementations of MVS exist (and were already useful 15 years ago, such as Hercules[1])
I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe.
Well they are. These things are built for a specific audience and it so happens that they are still willing to spend money on this, otherwise it wouldn't be made, especially not by IBM that is otherwise quick to disband business units that don't make heaps of money.
In my research I'm using an even older language: Fortran. Believe it or not, but in a field that is less narrow and specific than you would think[1], there's still no real replacement for (modern) Fortran.
[1] numeric applications that need to get close to the hardware's peak performance, written in a higher level language than C that is usable by non-CS-graduates.
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.
Not to mention that most compilers have OpenMP suport built-in. Also, there's the tons of heavily-optimized Fortran math libraries that make it easy to take advantage of big machines and big clusters.
Those scientists that are still using Fortran after all these years know what they're doing. It's not that they're ignorant of new technoglogy. A well-informed and open-minded CS person would probably end up using Fortran for these use cases, too.
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 Matlab-like slicing and operations, implemented as performant as possible, is enough reason alone to stay with Fortran.
Those scientists that are still using Fortran after all these years know what they're doing. It's not that they're ignorant of new technoglogy. A well-informed and open-minded CS person would probably end up using Fortran for these use cases, too.
Well, I'm sort of coming out of CS (computer engineering with focus on software) and I'm using it, so there ;)
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?
For Fortran style multidimensional arrays, libraries fly right out the window. First of all, you need slicing syntax and operators baked into the language. The compiler needs to be aware of the array's storage order, such that it can implement operations like A + B optimally for A, B as n-dimensional arrays. Then it needs to be aware of their boundaries, such that it can align the memory optimally.
So that leaves language level support. So far the only contender that I can see coming up is Julia - and it will take a lot of effort until it can reach performance levels on par with Fortran. This basically would require a big push by one of the big software companies - who all aren't making a lot of money in HPC software anymore. I could see Nvidia picking up the ball at some point, it would suit them well - but then we're getting into vendor lock-in again.
Sure. That is what you get e.g. with NumPy in Python. However, as you already said you only get "most" of it. The remaining niche is still large enough that Fortran has lots of users.
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.
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.
---
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.
One disadvantage of libraries is that the compiler treats them as regular code. If something is baked into the language, the compiler and run time (if any) can reason about particular operations and optimize them.
To be fair, anyone who uses numpy or scipy ends up using Fortran even if they don't know it. A lot of scientific libraries have been ultra optimized for Fortran.
I'm sure optimized libraries could be written in any language, however the vast number of researchers have decided that Fortran is by far more accurate and faster (for these libraries) so they go with that.
optimized libraries could be written in any language
Well, at least in anything that has really performant compilers. That's currently true for C, Fortran and Assembly, to some extent also C++. Between the first three, Fortran is by far the easiest to use for numerics - its syntax is in fact not much more difficult than Matlab. It's clunky in anything but numerical code (such as when you try to create a nice API or when you try to have generic methods), but at the end it still wins.
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 block structured language),
then the stack of that task (in some
ways nicer than just a thread)
is rolled (popped as in popping a
stack, which is essentially what happens)
back to the context of the last time
block B was active.
Block B can have a function F
that inherits names defined
in the blocks that contain
B, and block B can call a function
G, pass F as an entry variable,
and function G can call it's
parameter for function F, function
F can execute and access all the
variables it has access to that
function G may not. That can
be nice. I used it once when
scheduling the fleet for FedEx.
Can have tasks, like threads.
Can allocate some storage as, say,
controlled. Then when the
task ends, that allocated storage
is freed. That can be nice --
nice way to stop memory leaks
when have to kill a task.
PL/I has structures which
replace much of the utility of
classes. And the structures,
with arrays of structures of arrays
of structures of arrays, etc.,
are much faster than instances
of classes because all the
addressing is just a fairly
nice generalization of simple old
array addressing without pointers.
Such a structure can be based
which means that can allocate
one and get back a pointer to it.
So, that is a lot like allocating
an instance of a class. B can
be part of a structure A,
and B can be defined to be like
structure C -- so, can get
some inheritance.
The flat file I/O is much sweeter
than what is in C and was brought
over to, say, Visual Basic .NET
or C#.
PL/I will convert nearly any data type
to nearly any other, e.g., something
like a cast in the C family of
languages, but the documentation
says in very full and fine detail
just how each conversion is done.
There's a relatively powerful
pre-processor macro language
executed by the compiler
that can be used to generate a lot
of source code -- can be nice.
If they have tried to upgrade PL/I,
say, to 64 bit addressing,
maybe more on event handling,
some collection classes,
a sweet DB/2 or RDBMS interface
(it always had some DB syntax and
semantics in the language),
then it could be a nice language
even now.
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.
On VM/CMS and MVS,
PL/I didn't have access to TCP/IP,
but C did, so I wrote
some C code callable from PL/I
that gave PL/I access to
TCP/IP. Used it a little! Maybe
now TCP/IP is closer to being
native to the language.
I was in the group at IBM's Watson
lab that did the expert system
shell KnowledgeTool that was
implemented as a pre-processor to
PL/I. One night I stayed up until
dawn and coded the logic that
made rule subroutines fast,
functional, etc.
The key was to keep a crucial
part of our run time software
and the user's rule subroutine
on the stack of dynamic descendancy.
Gee, I got an award! The hourly
rate for that night was actually
relatively good!
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, but also in terms of security and compiler research.
One just has to look at PL/I, PL/M, Algol 68, Mesa and then to C.
Just as an example, Algol for B5000 systems (1961) already had the distinction between safe and unsafe code, with unsafe program modules requiring some form of "root" access. Sounds familiar?
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 called in and got a really
big, new account. The MVT/MVS family of operating systems,
with JCL, etc. was like an unanesthetized root canal
procedure while undergoing a barbed wire enema, but it
could get the work done.
Generally that computing is having problems with
virus is a total bummer -- we should be able to
run malicious code safely.
Gee, Flash keeps telling
me their code is a security risk. No joke! And
that's version 12 or so of their code. Flash guys,
I've got more to do than be a lab rat running on a
wheel going 'round and 'round downloading code.
Yup, looks like Flash guys or someone was correct:
I spent all of December and part of January fighting
a virus on Windows: Kept getting instances of
iexpore.exe running. Yes, that is the EXE of
Windows Internet Explorer (IE). So, I got those instances
even without starting IE. So, I ran Microsoft's latest
virus removal tools, days for each, and they found nothing.
The virus was still there. So, I did a Windows
System Restore back to the earliest copy I had, 2 months
ago. Seems to have worked. But that was about six
weeks of virus mud wrestling for no good reason.
A simple Google search shows that discussions about
fighing that
iexplore.exe problem is all over the Web;
apparently it is a very common virus.
Flash guys, are you to blame for that one?
Flash guys: Programming lesson 1 in Coding 101:
Check your input and detect any problems. If the
input is not suitably clean, then
refuse to use it. If the specifications of
your input is too complicated for a check,
at least good checks while running, then
correct your specifications. Flash guys,
I can understand one bug, but 12? Are you
guys even trying, I mean trying to fix
bugs instead of pushing users to
download?
And Microsoft guys, why do you let your code
let bad guys somewhere east of Moscow
mess up my computer? You guys just like
shipping bugs? Believe me, I do not
like fixing viruses.
As I recall, Multics was written in PL/I. Prime
had a version of PL/I and used it for much of their
operating system.
Once Google ran a recruiting ad and I sent them a
resume. I got a phone call from one of their
recruiters, and his big question was "What is your
favorite programming language?"
I said, "PL/I".
Wrong answer! Likely he was looking for C++.
Come on guy, I want to do something other than
fight memory leaks -- in PL/I if some work
is some part of my code raises an On Condition
(a software version of an interrupt, which
might also have been from a hardware interrupt),
then in the code block that gets executed by
the On Unit that has been established
for that condition, can decide what to do
with the interrupt. So, one thing to do is just
to kill off that work that raised the interrupt.
So, say that the block of the On Unit
that gets executed is X in code block B,
some code in block B did the function call
that got the work going, and just want to
kill off that work. So, from block X just
do a Goto to the statement label want
in block B and not in block X, and presto, bingo, that
work is killed off, that is, wiped clean
by the wrath of non-local Goto. So, in particular,
likely all the storage (all except based
storage) allocated by that worked to be killed
off is freed. So, look, Ma, no memory leaks
from exceptional condition handling!
Google guys: The original definition of C++
was just as a pre-processor to C. And you want
to assume that that is a lot better than
what IBM, George Radin, etc. did with PL/I?
Do you have anyone who understands PL/I?
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.
22nm is pretty close to the smallest; the fabs are ramping up for 14 in intel's case, and 16 for global foundries' case, but you're not gonna find much on the shelves right now with a smaller foundry. While SIMD's everywhere, dedicated crypto is fairly recent, with IBM notably doing elliptic curve acceleration, and dedicated compression is something that is new. On the other side, most of the CPU improvements they are touting are things everyone else is doing -- wider SIMD units, more cache, etc.
However, that's ignoring what's made a mainframe fast and expensive for the past several decades. Mainframes still slaughter all comers when it comes to I/O, and this is no different. When you've got up to 320 fibre links available, you're gonna have no problem keeping those processors busy.
Those features are new for COBOL and PL/I (as other commenters mentioned). Good luck getting Intel or ARM to care about your dusty decks full of BCD math.
It depends on what kinds of instructions you count. I strongly suspect that your 3GIps number is only register-to-register integer arithmetic, while the 110GIps is some IBM-ish "mixed workload" that uses most of the System/z instruction set. (which includes things like "get CRC32 of this buffer" as one instruction)
Average of Dhrystone and Whetstone, which is not a proper benchmark indeed.
Those special instructions such as CRC32 or SHA256 are rarely needed in scientific simulations such as Monte Carlo simulations or real-time working with Bayesian Network, what this system is aimed for. In these scenarios raw power and big on-board caches what matter and on paper the POWER8 has these, but 110 GIPS is not the best bang for bucks.
System z is completely different thing from what is currently called Power Systems. Target market for System z is pretty much limited to OLTP and most of the weirdness of the platform comes from the fact that it is heavily optimized for exactly that and not for raw speed in two's-complement or FP arithmetics.
That's a standard consumer chips though. The Xeon server line can, with the E7-8895 v2 do 15 cores per CPU and you can have 8 of them for a total of 240 hyperthreaded cores. I don't know what could take advantage of that and what the tradeoffs for scheduling etc. would be but Sun will sell you one: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/x8... -- 6TB of RAM.
True, but that is rather motherboard-design and core-stacking question. x86 CPUs are made for consumer use-cases, but that doesn't mean it can't be stacked almost linearly, like the Knights Landing CPUs.
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 the "mainframe" title, you are dead in this market of ultra-conservative customers (banks,airlines,etc).
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.
1. So far no cloud provider tried to provide reliability at the level of a mainframe.
2. Those conservative customers want to keep their data in-house. So a cloud is probably impossible to sell here.
They can either build their own "in-house cloud" (paradox?!) or buy a mainframe. The later is simpler and proven. Cost savings of the roll-your-own-in-house-cloud are questionable.
You could try to sell an ultra-reliable (maybe distributed) system for in-house use. However, you cannot call it a "mainframe".
Comments
I've found some specs:
- up to 141 configurable processors
- new 22nm 8-core processor chip@5GHZ
- 110GIPS
- Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) support
- On chip cryptographic and compression coprocessors
- up to 10 TB of memory (configured as 'memory raid', RAIM)
PDF is here: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/zs/en/zsd03035usen/...
I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe.
Most people would consider COBOL and PL/I to be laughably out of date languages from the 60s and 70s. But here's a new machine with 10 TB of RAM, and the release notes are quick to point out new features for COBOL and PL/I. Go figure.
I am on an iSeries, the little brother to the z. We have a pair of zSeries as well. COBOL and RPG (its fully free form by the way, looks like any other language) are both very much rooted in business logic, in particular math. Their number handling is well known and without inconsistencies of many newer languages. That and the code base is well established and works. Throw in that memory leaks are nearly non existent, code is independent of changes to the microprocessors and your investment always comes forward.
Seriously, we have code whose originals can be traced to systems long dead. Yet code is not stagnate, full SQL integration exists for most language, there are many ways to get to the web. That and you would be surprised at the number of companies who use these machines simply for one reason above all, reliability. Our last crash was a site failure and even then we rolled to the DR site instantly.
I've been lucky enough to do an internship in banking, where Cobol is (and I guess will be for the foreseable future) the core language.
I didn't have to write lots of Cobol, but it's been very educational: both its very rigorous syntax (and number handling as you said!) and the fact that the code I was modifying had been written even before I was born.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Cobol in itself is not a bad language at all! Mainframes are obviously rock solid and for development purposes, open source implementations of MVS exist (and were already useful 15 years ago, such as Hercules[1])
[1]http://www.hercules-390.org/
Well they are. These things are built for a specific audience and it so happens that they are still willing to spend money on this, otherwise it wouldn't be made, especially not by IBM that is otherwise quick to disband business units that don't make heaps of money.
In my research I'm using an even older language: Fortran. Believe it or not, but in a field that is less narrow and specific than you would think[1], there's still no real replacement for (modern) Fortran.
[1] numeric applications that need to get close to the hardware's peak performance, written in a higher level language than C that is usable by non-CS-graduates.
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.
Not to mention that most compilers have OpenMP suport built-in. Also, there's the tons of heavily-optimized Fortran math libraries that make it easy to take advantage of big machines and big clusters.
Those scientists that are still using Fortran after all these years know what they're doing. It's not that they're ignorant of new technoglogy. A well-informed and open-minded CS person would probably end up using Fortran for these use cases, too.
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 Matlab-like slicing and operations, implemented as performant as possible, is enough reason alone to stay with Fortran.
Well, I'm sort of coming out of CS (computer engineering with focus on software) and I'm using it, so there ;)
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?
For Fortran style multidimensional arrays, libraries fly right out the window. First of all, you need slicing syntax and operators baked into the language. The compiler needs to be aware of the array's storage order, such that it can implement operations like A + B optimally for A, B as n-dimensional arrays. Then it needs to be aware of their boundaries, such that it can align the memory optimally.
So that leaves language level support. So far the only contender that I can see coming up is Julia - and it will take a lot of effort until it can reach performance levels on par with Fortran. This basically would require a big push by one of the big software companies - who all aren't making a lot of money in HPC software anymore. I could see Nvidia picking up the ball at some point, it would suit them well - but then we're getting into vendor lock-in again.
Sure. That is what you get e.g. with NumPy in Python. However, as you already said you only get "most" of it. The remaining niche is still large enough that Fortran has lots of users.
http://www.numpy.org/
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.
One disadvantage of libraries is that the compiler treats them as regular code. If something is baked into the language, the compiler and run time (if any) can reason about particular operations and optimize them.
couldn't any other language add matlab style matrices and end up being as good as it, fortran, etc?
In theory, sure. In practice a bunch of languages have tried and yet Fortran is still the king.
To be fair, anyone who uses numpy or scipy ends up using Fortran even if they don't know it. A lot of scientific libraries have been ultra optimized for Fortran.
I'm sure optimized libraries could be written in any language, however the vast number of researchers have decided that Fortran is by far more accurate and faster (for these libraries) so they go with that.
Well, at least in anything that has really performant compilers. That's currently true for C, Fortran and Assembly, to some extent also C++. Between the first three, Fortran is by far the easiest to use for numerics - its syntax is in fact not much more difficult than Matlab. It's clunky in anything but numerical code (such as when you try to create a nice API or when you try to have generic methods), but at the end it still wins.
If you want to learn a bit more about mainframes, this podcast http://www.se-radio.net/2012/03/episode-184-the-mainframe-wi... has a lot of great info.
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 block structured language), then the stack of that task (in some ways nicer than just a thread) is rolled (popped as in popping a stack, which is essentially what happens) back to the context of the last time block B was active.
Block B can have a function F that inherits names defined in the blocks that contain B, and block B can call a function G, pass F as an entry variable, and function G can call it's parameter for function F, function F can execute and access all the variables it has access to that function G may not. That can be nice. I used it once when scheduling the fleet for FedEx.
Can have tasks, like threads. Can allocate some storage as, say, controlled. Then when the task ends, that allocated storage is freed. That can be nice -- nice way to stop memory leaks when have to kill a task.
PL/I has structures which replace much of the utility of classes. And the structures, with arrays of structures of arrays of structures of arrays, etc., are much faster than instances of classes because all the addressing is just a fairly nice generalization of simple old array addressing without pointers.
Such a structure can be based which means that can allocate one and get back a pointer to it. So, that is a lot like allocating an instance of a class. B can be part of a structure A, and B can be defined to be like structure C -- so, can get some inheritance.
The flat file I/O is much sweeter than what is in C and was brought over to, say, Visual Basic .NET or C#.
PL/I will convert nearly any data type to nearly any other, e.g., something like a cast in the C family of languages, but the documentation says in very full and fine detail just how each conversion is done.
There's a relatively powerful pre-processor macro language executed by the compiler that can be used to generate a lot of source code -- can be nice.
If they have tried to upgrade PL/I, say, to 64 bit addressing, maybe more on event handling, some collection classes, a sweet DB/2 or RDBMS interface (it always had some DB syntax and semantics in the language), then it could be a nice language even now.
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.
On VM/CMS and MVS, PL/I didn't have access to TCP/IP, but C did, so I wrote some C code callable from PL/I that gave PL/I access to TCP/IP. Used it a little! Maybe now TCP/IP is closer to being native to the language.
I was in the group at IBM's Watson lab that did the expert system shell KnowledgeTool that was implemented as a pre-processor to PL/I. One night I stayed up until dawn and coded the logic that made rule subroutines fast, functional, etc. The key was to keep a crucial part of our run time software and the user's rule subroutine on the stack of dynamic descendancy. Gee, I got an award! The hourly rate for that night was actually relatively good!
PL/I doesn't have to be so bad!
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, but also in terms of security and compiler research.
One just has to look at PL/I, PL/M, Algol 68, Mesa and then to C.
Just as an example, Algol for B5000 systems (1961) already had the distinction between safe and unsafe code, with unsafe program modules requiring some form of "root" access. Sounds familiar?
Burroughs, being a stack machine, had MMU like qualities 'for free. Desktop got there 25 years later.
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 called in and got a really big, new account. The MVT/MVS family of operating systems, with JCL, etc. was like an unanesthetized root canal procedure while undergoing a barbed wire enema, but it could get the work done.
Generally that computing is having problems with virus is a total bummer -- we should be able to run malicious code safely.
Gee, Flash keeps telling me their code is a security risk. No joke! And that's version 12 or so of their code. Flash guys, I've got more to do than be a lab rat running on a wheel going 'round and 'round downloading code.
Yup, looks like Flash guys or someone was correct: I spent all of December and part of January fighting a virus on Windows: Kept getting instances of iexpore.exe running. Yes, that is the EXE of Windows Internet Explorer (IE). So, I got those instances even without starting IE. So, I ran Microsoft's latest virus removal tools, days for each, and they found nothing. The virus was still there. So, I did a Windows System Restore back to the earliest copy I had, 2 months ago. Seems to have worked. But that was about six weeks of virus mud wrestling for no good reason.
A simple Google search shows that discussions about fighing that iexplore.exe problem is all over the Web; apparently it is a very common virus.
Flash guys, are you to blame for that one?
Flash guys: Programming lesson 1 in Coding 101: Check your input and detect any problems. If the input is not suitably clean, then refuse to use it. If the specifications of your input is too complicated for a check, at least good checks while running, then correct your specifications. Flash guys, I can understand one bug, but 12? Are you guys even trying, I mean trying to fix bugs instead of pushing users to download?
And Microsoft guys, why do you let your code let bad guys somewhere east of Moscow mess up my computer? You guys just like shipping bugs? Believe me, I do not like fixing viruses.
As I recall, Multics was written in PL/I. Prime had a version of PL/I and used it for much of their operating system.
Once Google ran a recruiting ad and I sent them a resume. I got a phone call from one of their recruiters, and his big question was "What is your favorite programming language?"
I said, "PL/I".
Wrong answer! Likely he was looking for C++.
Come on guy, I want to do something other than fight memory leaks -- in PL/I if some work is some part of my code raises an On Condition (a software version of an interrupt, which might also have been from a hardware interrupt), then in the code block that gets executed by the On Unit that has been established for that condition, can decide what to do with the interrupt. So, one thing to do is just to kill off that work that raised the interrupt. So, say that the block of the On Unit that gets executed is X in code block B, some code in block B did the function call that got the work going, and just want to kill off that work. So, from block X just do a Goto to the statement label want in block B and not in block X, and presto, bingo, that work is killed off, that is, wiped clean by the wrath of non-local Goto. So, in particular, likely all the storage (all except based storage) allocated by that worked to be killed off is freed. So, look, Ma, no memory leaks from exceptional condition handling!
Google guys: The original definition of C++ was just as a pre-processor to C. And you want to assume that that is a lot better than what IBM, George Radin, etc. did with PL/I? Do you have anyone who understands PL/I?
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.
The specs from 2045 will still mention COBOL, PL/I and of course Java.
This parallel universe is called reality and you live in the matrix.
Maybe I'm out of the loop, but isn't 22nm big, SIMD available on almost everything, and dedicated crypto and compression more or less ubiquitous?
22nm is pretty close to the smallest; the fabs are ramping up for 14 in intel's case, and 16 for global foundries' case, but you're not gonna find much on the shelves right now with a smaller foundry. While SIMD's everywhere, dedicated crypto is fairly recent, with IBM notably doing elliptic curve acceleration, and dedicated compression is something that is new. On the other side, most of the CPU improvements they are touting are things everyone else is doing -- wider SIMD units, more cache, etc.
However, that's ignoring what's made a mainframe fast and expensive for the past several decades. Mainframes still slaughter all comers when it comes to I/O, and this is no different. When you've got up to 320 fibre links available, you're gonna have no problem keeping those processors busy.
Those features are new for COBOL and PL/I (as other commenters mentioned). Good luck getting Intel or ARM to care about your dusty decks full of BCD math.
110 GIPS is not too much for 141 CPU. My Core i7 4700HQ CPU dos 3 GIPS/core at 2.9 GHz.
It depends on what kinds of instructions you count. I strongly suspect that your 3GIps number is only register-to-register integer arithmetic, while the 110GIps is some IBM-ish "mixed workload" that uses most of the System/z instruction set. (which includes things like "get CRC32 of this buffer" as one instruction)
Average of Dhrystone and Whetstone, which is not a proper benchmark indeed.
Those special instructions such as CRC32 or SHA256 are rarely needed in scientific simulations such as Monte Carlo simulations or real-time working with Bayesian Network, what this system is aimed for. In these scenarios raw power and big on-board caches what matter and on paper the POWER8 has these, but 110 GIPS is not the best bang for bucks.
System z is completely different thing from what is currently called Power Systems. Target market for System z is pretty much limited to OLTP and most of the weirdness of the platform comes from the fact that it is heavily optimized for exactly that and not for raw speed in two's-complement or FP arithmetics.
yes but buying 3 of them gets you 3 machines that can do 3GIPS, not one machine that can do 9GIPS
That's a standard consumer chips though. The Xeon server line can, with the E7-8895 v2 do 15 cores per CPU and you can have 8 of them for a total of 240 hyperthreaded cores. I don't know what could take advantage of that and what the tradeoffs for scheduling etc. would be but Sun will sell you one: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/x8... -- 6TB of RAM.
True, but that is rather motherboard-design and core-stacking question. x86 CPUs are made for consumer use-cases, but that doesn't mean it can't be stacked almost linearly, like the Knights Landing CPUs.
I'm curious what one might expect something like this to cost.
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 the "mainframe" title, you are dead in this market of ultra-conservative customers (banks,airlines,etc).
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.
1. So far no cloud provider tried to provide reliability at the level of a mainframe.
2. Those conservative customers want to keep their data in-house. So a cloud is probably impossible to sell here.
They can either build their own "in-house cloud" (paradox?!) or buy a mainframe. The later is simpler and proven. Cost savings of the roll-your-own-in-house-cloud are questionable.
You could try to sell an ultra-reliable (maybe distributed) system for in-house use. However, you cannot call it a "mainframe".