IBM Mainframes
What comes to mind when you hear the words heavy
build heavy iron, my high school nickname Well,
it turns out big iron isn’t one of those things and usually refers
to huge mainframes that usually live inside big cabinets
OK, then Linus, so you’re talking about a supercomputer,
in fact, no keyframes are defined a little differently in our episode at
Supercomputers you can check out here, IBM Mainframes
we discussed how they are great at processing numbers
for completing very complex tasks like weather forecasting,
medical research and cryptanalysis,
but with mainframes the focus is more
on throughput and reliability so what exactly does
that mean compared to something Like supercomputers,
mainframes have a lot of inputs and outputs or I/O because
they are often deployed in situations where they are not solving a single complex problem.
But it has to process tons of the smallest transactions very fast
in fact despite a common misconception that mainframes are the remnants
of a bygone computing era to process up to millions of card swipes
and account transfers that happened every day 96 of the top 100 Bank
in the world and 23 of the top 25 US retailers currently operate mainframes
from IBM Mainframes which has been the dominant player in the industry for a very long time in building one.
Although it’s not just a matter of installing a ton of Zeon
in a box that plugs into a lot of Ethernet cables
and connects to it today, mainframes use proprietary CPUs,
many of which are physically larger than even large desktop chips like
Intel’s 2011 socket CPUs. Plus additional processors called bag-assisted processors
or PSAPs that do nothing but move data as fast as possible
like glorified traffic controllers instead of general-purpose
number analyzers, and that’s not all on
a modern mainframe like IBM Mainframes high-end e13 ,
each single IO card can have a hundred and sixty having
its own processing cycle of up to two per channel
on dual channel cards which means you can have more
than 600 I/O processor cores only, that doesn’t even count errors
Part of the reason more central frames
are designed to support this amount of I/O is to ensure
they remain reliable, so many subsystems within
a mainframe such as modern aircraft will have built-in redundancy,
meaning they can be deployed in situations where there is no downtime
About Business Acceptable as above credit .
and retailers as well as airline ticket systems Actually
a central shared operating system IBM’s owned ztp f
was originally developed as transaction processing software
for airlines If you want to see it in action, pay close attention
next time you You’re on a flight and you might get a glimpse
of the computer screen they’re using to check you in an old school
interface with green text indicates it’s probably a terminal attached
to a central frame and you’re not looking closely at it
So this high level of redundancy means
that it’s common for mainframes to be built in such
a way that an administrator can slide what trays contain components
and simply start swapping them no matter what that tray is working
on gets automatically transferred to the rest of the mainframe making
it easier Make necessary hardware changes without any downtime,
which is also good because high-end mainframes
can run many virtual servers up to 8000 in case of z13 which means
removing centralization can lead to a lot of transaction errors on Black Friday,
IBM Mainframes But before you start thinking
I have to get a mainframe because I want to run the monitoring like some kind of 50 monitor setup and their operating systems just aren’t that expensive.
A mainframe computer can cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars,
and it’s not designed for gaming or for high-end floating point performance
that’s important for graphics rendering,
but even then keyframes are still in the background powering
a lot of the things you do Every day which is pretty cool unless you swear
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