Comment by mikehollinger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikehollinger | Hacker News Reader

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So I joined IBM in 2005 working on firmware for a project called eCLipz, which eventually produced the POWER6 family of systems. We've just shipped POWER9 which is in the #1 and #2 supercomputers in the world, Summit and Sierra. [1]

The "i/p/z" part of the project name is important, because it represents:

i - the lineage of the AS/400, which was a 'minicomputer' design from the 80's designed for multiple users, which came up with the idea of "wizards" for administration tasks before there was even a name for a "wizard." The "i" means "integrated," since IBM i is meant to require very little administration. [2] [4]

p - the lineage of the RS/6000, which begat AIX UNIX. The "p" indicated "performance." The box I worked on shipped at 5 GHz in 2008 (IIRC).

z - the lineage of the System/360 mainframe which the above article discusses. The "z" indicated "zero downtime."

The control structure and power and cooling infrastructure for the systems used common elements with that project. The hardware and firmware underneath the operating systems for i and p converged into Power systems, which eventually produced a variety of projects in the open source community (OpenCAPI, OpenPOWER itself, OpenBMC), and of course runs bi-endian to support things like little-endian Ubuntu or the classic Big-endian AIX or i/OS on the same processor core.

Interesting trivia - In IBM systems (Mainframe or Power), the cold boot of the processor from an unpowered state is called an "Initial Program Load," or IPL. The IPL lingo dates back to System/360 (see its Wikipedia), and survives to this day in really interesting places in the wild. Take the OpenBMC project, which aims to create a 100% open source software stack for those sideband management processors found in servers (and increasingly in other devices too). This github bug from a few months ago which complains about a bug causing "IPL" problems. [3] ;-)

[1] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/11/12/18087470/...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i

[3] https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc/issues/2831

[4] edit - fixed "70's" to "80's" per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18494866 ;-)

> i - the lineage of the AS/400, which was a 'minicomputer' design from the 70's designed for multiple users, which came up with the idea of "wizards" for administration tasks before there was even a name for a "wizard." The "i" means "integrated," since IBM i is meant to require very little administration. [2]

That specific system was introduced in the 1980s, but it's even more interesting than that, because it's the last remnant of the Future Systems project which did date to the 1970s:

https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html

> The IBM Future System (FS) project was a design effort to succeed the IBM S/370 architecture that was adopted company wide in 1971. FS was based on a single-level store with automatic data management. The project is reputed to have cost more than $1B when it was cancelled in February 1975, but the single-level store idea was adopted by System/38, AS/400, and iSeries.

It had interesting effects on IBM:

> Most corrosive of all, the old IBM candor died with F/S. Top management, particularly Opel, reacted defensively as F/S headed toward a debacle. The IBM culture that Watson had built was a harsh one, but it encouraged dissent and open controversy. But because of the heavy investment of face by the top management, F/S took years to kill, although its wrongheadedness was obvious from the very outset. "For the first time, during F/S, outspoken criticism became politically dangerous," recalls a former top executive."

Beware the Superproject!

Oh - and to avoid rewriting the statement completely, I edited the "70's" to "80's" in the original comment referring to yours.

Oh, good point! Yeah, I munged together the AS/400, and its predecessors. And fascinating - I hadn't heard of that history!

I have friends who still say their program "abended".

Just a minor nitpick - the green screens we see today are also often descendants of the 3270 family as well as the 5250's that started life with the System/34 and found their way into the AS/400 and iSeries.

I had to nitpick because the 3270 is where this beautiful (shameless plug) font originated: https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font

Are... are there people who don't? :O

I haven't ever really worked on Mainframe as such, but I _am_ in the IBM/ERP world, and, well, a program Abends, that's just what it does when it goes South. Not even sure what else to call it - failed? Errorred out? ...Segfaulted its guts on the ground? :->

(edit: I suppose I should also fess up that we call virtual machines "LPARs" and physical machines "frames" :P )

It took me a long time to accept Docker's use of the word "container".

To me, "virtual machine" has a distinctive Smalltalk 80 feel. And, of course, it's a bit underwhelming in comparison.

ABEND was also used in Novell Netware, I wouldn't be surprised if that's the most recent actual incarnation (rather than a reference, as in a game).

Ha! Fair enough. Lessee if I can edit...

Thanks for this shot of nostalgia that is rushing through my brain. Yes, I remember IPL from z/OS, working with RACF (Resource Access Control Facility), LPAR (Logical Partitions), and the complexity of Parallel Sysplex (clustering) all leading up to running COBOL and PL/I applications mostly for banks.

The TN3270 terminals, and the wild hacks of writing Assembler macros to translate those TN3270 inputs and outputs to a webservice :-)

I have never worked with the Power systems personally, but heard a lot of good things about it.

It always felt like IBM enterprise stuff that $$$$ heavy are in a world of its own completely disconnected from people who cant think in that much $$$s.

> It always felt like IBM enterprise stuff that $$$$ heavy are in a world of its own completely disconnected from people who cant think in that much $$$s.

You're not wrong. Licenses for even the most trivial of software cost literal fortunes.

It's just that these systems process billions of software and run millions of lines written decades ago.

The cost is a mere blip.

When I first heard about eCLipz, I thought it was pushing towards a single processor architecture for all three series. From today's article, it seems as though z/Series machines still get quite distinct CPUs, though. Do you know to what extend these processors are relatives of the POWER9?

POWER6 and z10 share functional blocks, but the ISAs are pretty different.

I'm not familiar with the z architecture enough to comment with any sense of certainty, and the people I'd normally pester are on vacation, unfortunately.

I do love the lingo from these machines. I remember encountering the need to "vary off" an interface.

The weirdest was the being told I needed to "wand on" the system. I guess the origin was from the AS/400 when they were pushing cards with a barcode as ids, so you would scan your card with a optical wand (pen) to login to your station. Years later I still hear "wand on".

Was the firmware still based on PL/S? In case you are allowed to disclose it.

Proper IPL is done through switches on a front panel ;)

I actually had to use those switches (well buttons) on an iSeries recently. I’ve never been that nervous with any Unix command.

One bit error and it's back to square one. The good part is that if you do it often enough you start to memorize some of it!

For what it's worth, "IPL" was in use for other sorts of systems in the '80s (doubtless influenced by 360 usage).

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