- 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/...
> 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Most people would consider COBOL and PL/I to be laughably out of date languages from the 60s and 70s.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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 ;)
In theory, sure. In practice a bunch of languages have tried and yet Fortran is still the king.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This parallel universe is called reality and you live in the matrix.
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 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])
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 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.
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).
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.
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".