IBM Z/OS v2.5, Next-Gen Operating System Designed for Hybrid Cloud and AI
newsroom.ibm.com
newsroom.ibm.com
who needs performance, current hardware is too fast for non-server meanwhile cruds can be optimized anyway
Or provide profiles for different power situations.
Security, folks. A fast car without seatbelts is a death trap, not a means of transportation.
With LPAR the ransomware would have really lucky if it were aware of where it's being running from.
https://research.ibm.com/blog/qiskit-summer-school-machine-l...
I’m not it’s most proficient user but from the stuff I do in it, it’s basically half CMS half relational database with some search and export functions.
It’s called “IBM OpenPages with Watson” because of:
“Translate documents across 50+ languages, obtain 24/7 support with a GRC virtual assistant, promote accuracy and efficiency in incident reporting with AI relevant classifications.”
So apparently “Watson” now means “translating and auto filling stuff”?
You already have access controls restricting to trusted parties. Slapping a blockchain on top would just be adding complexity and overhead at this stage.
> With z/OS V2.5, IBM is introducing new high performance AI capabilities that are tightly integrated with z/OS workloads, designed to give clients business insights for more informed decision making.
PRETTY PLEASE
ADD SALES_TAX TO PRICE GIVING NET_PRICE
THANK YOU VERY MUCHBut trying to tie an extremely compute intensive requirement (AI) to an environment with probably the highest $$/MIPS is just...dumb.
but in many other similar circumstances they give the option of buying Application Assist Processors. That takes the work away from the main processor.
It is possible that IBM will offer some custom zAAP optimized for running the AI workloads.
IBM also open up running AI in their cloud.
zAAPs, zIIPs and IFLs are exactly the same hardware as main processors. The difference between them is purely at the licensing level. The firmware sets a flag saying "don't run classic z/OS workloads". z/OS sees that flag set and then will only schedule "new" workloads (such as Java and XML) to that processor. Actually there is an undocumented API you can use to schedule any (enclave SRB mode) workload to the zAAP – IBM keeps it under NDA, and ISVs have to agree to obey IBM's rules about what workloads are allowed to run as part of that NDA. (One ISV, Neon, started selling a tool to run an arbitrary workload on the zAAP, called zPrime, IBM immediately sued them, and Neon settled the lawsuit in 2011 and agreed to drop the tool). Other operating systems, such as z/Linux, ignore that flag completely and to them a zAAP is just the same as a normal main processor (CP).
> It is possible that IBM will offer some custom zAAP optimized for running the AI workloads.
Yes but that wouldn't be a zAAP. They do have hardware accelerators for various functions (crypto, compression, sorting) but those aren't zAAPs (or zIIPs or IFLs). Crypto acceleration is CPACF (extra CPU instructions on main CPUs) and Crypto Express (external accelerator card). Compression hardware acceleration is zEDC. Sorting hardware acceleration is the Integrated Accelerator for Z Sort.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facilit...
Also like the PC, IBM didn't realize that their boxes could be used for this new funky thing called the internet. Talk about blind-sighted. Their first web product was an abomination they inherited from their purchase of Lotus. It didn't work and produced unusable websites, boding poorly for IBM's entry into that market which was already taking off with Active Server Pages and XMLHTTP.
If IBM had loudly (and correctly) proclaimed that mainframes were the place to run web services, everyone and their mother would be running mainframes right now instead of Linux boxes. IBM's eventual realization of this led to their purchase of Red Hat!
No, they wouldn't. I could take one Linux box, get a domain name, and have a web server. I wouldn't be able to afford a mainframe, though. And if your alternative is renting a fraction of a mainframe, the answer is no. No, I will not trade a Linux box that I control for renting a piece of a mainframe that I don't control. Just no.
Try that with Kubernetes!
In peer reviews, for example, it was standard to bring output from both the failing case and the working case as printed handouts. Those were easy to generate; just spin up two machines and fix one while you leave the other broken. They can share resources if you like so you don't have recreate everything. That is horribly messy today. Testing is so hard most people don't do it.
On firewalls, PF has a syntax simpler than most text adventure games.
Every time I get into the GNU world, well, I get better HW support sometimes, among a slight bit of performance, but, FFS, configuring a Linux firewall gives me nightmares everyday. Just compare NAT on Linux vs OpenBSD. Or TUN/TAP devices, where in OpenBSD it's just a matter of a SINGLE line at pf.conf and two hostname.if files to define the bridge and the tap device with a subnet. Done. Oh, and sysctl to set IP forwarding, but that was the easiest task on any OS.
I wrote a horrible, hacky, CMS PIPES based gopher/http server for VM some time in 1993 that was used internally for various "non serious" things. A colleague and I designed a native HTTP server for MVS in 1995 and had started coding it when we were more or less reprimanded and told to defer to the then Network Services division which was porting something (I think CERN httpd, they had a bizarre fascination with CERN) to MVS.
It just wasn't in anyone's best interest to even experiment with web services on VM or MVS, let alone try to build a business out of it.
Cloud happened after I left, but the infrastructure to build or respond to the rise of AWS was never in place, sort of by design.
I love my Hp 200 dos calculator whilst waiting for the cartridge to run, … at least it is not open reel tape as the cartridge tape at least always suck in.
You can also get free access to small vps running Linux on a mainfram on the IBM cloud
What's the point? VM with linux is hardly interesting to anyone.
That was several hours ago. The site's still down.
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210729160256/https://mtm.maste...
Everything's back to exactly how it was before, even down to using "" (ie, empty string) where my name should be. Excellent.
I must say that site responsiveness is much, much slower than it was when it was serving spam. :D
The only reason I haven't pursued this myself is that MVS is ultimately just not objectively compelling enough, because while it's similar to what's out there today, I get the impression I'd only have to unlearn an arbitrary bunch of things once I was on the "real" system.
As an aside, I happened to stumble on a copy of "IBM and The Holocaust" a few years ago. It's a startling insight into IBM's beginnings tabulating and wrangling data on the millions of Jews "processed" throughout Germany in WW2, which turned out to be the first commoditized consumption of what would today be regarded (without a second thought) as big data.
The world has certainly moved on since that point and IBM's DNA is completely different today, but IMO the "data processing" energy still remains as an incredibly strong centerpoint, and I honestly see mainframes as a digitized realization of the punched-card concepts IBM's beginnings were founded upon. (Combined with the institutionalization aspects I hinted at in the first paragraph, this is the main reason I'm very hesitant I'd survive in what sounds like an especially rigorous environment.)
While the UI of reading a printed book hasn't yet been beaten (I'll switch to e-readers once they can pageflip instantly -.-), it's very practical to be able to virtually pick up a book and thumb through any portion. To this end, PDFs of this title seem to readily be floating around, for example (open as URL) data:text;base64,aHR0cDovL3Bvc29oLnJ1L2Jvb2svaHRtL2libS5wZGY
I will note that after reading I kinda looked askance at my ThinkPads a bit and went "wow, what a history. uhhh....". Fair warning :)
Interesting at times but really really not fun
Now I'm pulling for them, I actually own a POWER9 machine. I think it is great that they want to get memory controllers out of the CPU - but they've done it in such a way that leads me to believe that it is an intentional sabotage, which would only happen if they genuinely had no interest in an active hardware role.
[0] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/PM8596
[1] https://github.com/open-power/ocmb-explorer-fw/blob/6570112a...
The trend is out of the CPU now? I was hoping they would instead start layering DRAM stacks on the CPU die.
HBM on the die is crazy high performance.
With a bus like CXL you could have a card full of memory chips that is shared by multiple CPUs. The z machines have a system like this it is just proprietary for them.
Memory that is less coupled to the CPU won't be as fast as HBM but you can have a lot more of it.
IBM had merged it into Watson, kept the acronym, but changed the words. Then they stopped making it available in any meaningful way.
I was so pissed. I’m sure my company would have paid out the nose for it.
I got the feeling it was a capture-and-kill situation.
IBM does have a reputation for buying competitors in very niche areas, like process planning software, and then not doing anything with them except maybe parting them out several years later. It looks suspicious, but I think that is more to do with the way they stick to hyper-specialized enterprise solutions... the pickings are naturally very slim.
I work in the display industry. I've never heard that e-ink "freezes everyone else out" from colleagues, coworkers or even gossip at conferences. Surely, if this was true we would have heard about it. Could you elaborate on your claim and if you experienced this? Please see my comment history to see why I keep asking about this.
Electrophoretic display technology has a barrier to entry that can be vaulted by anyone capable of standing up a moderately sophisticated light industrial facility.
Electrophoretic display technology is so useful that E Ink Holdings Inc rationally leverages the legal protection of the USPO through a large number of patents to maximize profits.
Electrophoretic display technology is so useless that consumer demand is only able to support a small number of manufacturers (who are able to demand very high prices).
I'd need to have a very low opinion of a "display guy" to believe he was genuinely arguing in good faith, and in keeping with the spirit of HN (hallowed be its name), that the market forces an OS is subject to (like user training with regard to network effect) have any overlap with display hardware (which is unaffected by prior user uptake). Because anyone arguing that would have to be ignorant of both subjects... but why would such an ignorant person be so invested in white knighting a hardware company? Oh well, doesn't matter - my opinion was already arbitrarily settled upon for completely irrational reasons.
> HN (hallowed be its name
> white knighting
You clearly have very high opinions of yourself and your belief system. It is clear you are unwilling to respond with facts when simple questions challenge your claims and react with hostility. I don't think there's any beneficial discussion possible going forward. Best of luck in your endeavours.
It starts out with the marketing buzzwords but then drills down into the technical nitty-gritty. In terms of what the "AI" stuff actually means, one answer is contained on slide 121 – support for running Tensorflow and ONNX inside a Linux Docker container using zCX (which lets you run z/Linux Docker containers under z/OS). The zCX SIMD support referenced on slide 102 is probably highly relevant to this.
I wouldn't be surprised if, with some clever programming, one could pipe data from disk directly to GPUs and back to disk without involving the CPUs that run user programs except for the thinnest slice of time.
But, considering what you paid for the mainframe, you probably have the budget to commission them to write drivers just for you (or to license their source and compile it yourself).
Btw given they do linux can they twist so that channel is partition into for that linux container. In the new world just driver through.
A new OS is a significant endevour and there is a lot of release notes on any and all topics - technical, usability, timelines, compatibility, hardware, architecture, support, upgrade methodology, etc.
Reading between the lines, doesn't this say that the execs are concerned about being so heavily reliant on their mainframes and so are transitioning mainframe workloads to cloud environments at a rapid pace?
When dealing with IBM, it's always safest to assume the weaseleiest interpretation of their weasel words.
Like "uh, we moved payroll to cloud and this mainframe job needs that data".
(disclaimer: I still claim to be scarred from being a former IBMer)
That is, the only driving requirement left for IBM mainframes is your own software that depends on system software that only exists on IBM mainframes.
Same reason some people still use other old environments like HP MPE, IBM AS/400, and Tandem Nonstop, and so on. They have found, thus far, that the cost of doing that is less than the cost of rewriting it. Or they have been unable to do that for reasons other than cost.
Edit: Separately, there are still some technical advantages. z/OS mainframes have a level of "within the rack" redundancy that you won't find in commodity servers. Or, with TPF, it's difficult to engineer a solution that scales as well and remains reliable...it's a very battle tested distributed K/V store that deals with heavy write contention.
That's an aside though. The reason people keep buying them is software lock in, yes. There's a reason Amazon likes to push their proprietary services...they are the new mainframe.
In a high availability environment (like banking or airline reservations, as mentioned), mainframes never go off, even during upgrades. When physical machines need replacement, the entire system is run in parallel on a second machine.
These boxes have both incredible I/O hardware (there's never been anything like IBM channel I/O) and the software to keep everything humming. On a typical day when I worked there, we'd have a 1,000 devs using the same box (and that was a small installation) with multiple operating systems, virtualizations, etc. with zero hiccups.
IBM also has amazing software for getting stuff done. Documentation, for example, is universal and available worldwide from any terminal. When you want a printed manual, the system figures out which big, fast printer is near you and offers to print it down the hall. Every IBM employee has access to all the company's resources from every terminal, and it all just works.
Yes, PCs have caught up to emulating many of these features, but they definitely don't have the robustness or ease of use that System/370 (z/OS) did.
Of course part of the reason it faded away (indeed, was gradually fading away even when I worked for Tandem) is that almost nobody does need that sort of reslience.
Bank calls the Tandem support line: "Our computer is down. It crashed! How do we get it back up?"
It wasn't offline. It had fallen over, punching through some of the sections of the raised floor.
--- 1. Well, I guess second-and-a-half. I played a little with Z-80 on my Spectravideo computer, but mostly that was writing a disassembler in MSX basic to reverse-engineer how the system worked after it was abandoned by its manufacturer. The disassembler was never finished because I didn't properly manage the multibyte opcodes.
These days if you can parallelise those calculations the price benefits of servers are worth the software complexity.
A Z15 core runs at 5.2 GHz (IIRC) and has shared access to 960 MB of L4 cache for every group of 4 sockets of 10 cores each (Linux workloads can do SMT2 on each core). They emphasize single-thread speed because they measured diminishing returns when adding more cores to an LPAR and figured out it was pointless to play a numbers game.
> These days if you can parallelise those calculations
Yes, but it's not all workloads that are amenable to that - some will want to keep a consistent in-memory representation of the working data with all cores working on the same data. If you can scale out, great. If you can't, this is the very top of the line. It you need to scale up from a z15, I suggest you wait for the z16 availability ;-)
Also: telcos, hospitals, airlines, and state/federal government agencies.
There are better examples of great IBM PC products, like the ThinkPad.
I suppose divestiture of GTS is attempt to do that kind of slimming.
Disclosure - I'm an IBM employee, but always on external gigs so have zero knowledge of direction or internal matters other than what I read here and on The Register... all opinions my own etc :)
I was surprised to find out that Z15 already supports CRYSTALS-Dilithium-6-5 digital signature algorithm. It's a lattice based post-quantum cryptography algorithm. I assumed that those algorithms are still under development.
I know you buy it fully configured according to what you ordered (every unit is custom-built, the ultimate luxury computer - take that, Apple) but, still, most people will have no idea what to even ask for or what the possibilities are.
Having a hobby license for z/PDT or z/OS would be awesome, but I don't think it's coming. IBM got mad when the Hercules crowd started selling Hercules as sort of an off-ramp for mainframe users.
There are still companies (Visa, Airlines, GDS) having issues getting off the more unique TPF operating system. It's basically a distributed K/V data store that scales very well and deals well with write contention. So far, only Amadeus has been able to migrate off of it. Some smaller airlines were able to migrate away, but not the larger ones.
The company that Google bought (ITA), was on their way to writing a full reservations system. They had finished the shopping engine but not the whole system. That was a company chock full of money of talent, and they didn't finish. Though their shopping engine is the best one that exists.
Edit: Somewhat related point. The "developer efficiency" was quite good in these environments. Since the OS came with everything a developer needed, there was mostly only one right way to do everything. The languages, libraries, database, batch management, "UI", authentication/authorization, security, and so on, was already decided for you.
Of course you could use Linux or similar for such jobs, but highly specialized hardware+software pairings can eke out surprising performance at the cost of massive hardware and software-engineering bills.
The onsite Tandem engineers had never been faced with a NonStop setup that just...stopped (actually it was worse than that). Bear in mind this was the company that used to do demos by randomly unplugging hardware and the transactions kept chugging along. We ended up punting coverage to a smaller flat version of the site served off Compaqs running IIS while we cleaned up the mess.
Now, Tandem shouldn't feel bad. After all, Cisco had guys in the hosting facility trying to keep the then-new PIX series up and running.
The thing with systems designed to never go down is that you still need to be sure the recovery process works well. Never going down is just half if your nines.
> served off Compaqs running IIS
Yikes!
Run it in a VM instance that can be snapshotted/checkpointed, so that any reboot turns into "suspend and resume from checkpoint"? Or are there any pitfalls to just doing that?
Never played around with one. But it must be working so reliably well in some specific field ( I am guessing Accounting and Finance ) that those end users, not engineers or IT, but actual people using the system dont want it to be replaced, only upgraded.
[1] https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1408469812318195716
It seems like they sell some products that might compete with themselves.
All of these proved to be complete disasters. Ultimately, the value add they provide to the people that use them is that the backwards compatibility. Trying to consolidate them all created compromises and complexity which sank the projects in question.
Consolidation has worked on a relatively small scale where two platforms were combined, attempts to produce one platform to rule them all have generally failed.
Abort, Retry, Fail?