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rbanffy

I always find it amusing that the least sexy of languages runs on the sexiest systems.

A modern mainframe is a thing to behold.

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Do you mind expanding a bit?

https://www.thegreengrid.org/ja/newsroom/blog/making-ibm-mag...

https://www.ibm.com/z

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer

They lost a bit of their glam when moved from 24" racks to 19" ones so that the datacenter people could hide these beauties in warehouse sized facilities instead of being proudly displayed at corporate headquarters ;-)

tianhe-1, cerebras, the ga144, and the ambiq apollo4 do not generally run cobol

Meh. None of those has the weird multi-gigabyte L4 caches of a Telum. And none of them will continue working during an earthquake.

whatchoo talkin bout willis

the cerebras wse-2 has 40 gigabytes of on-chip sram, pretty sure tianhe-1 has a few gigabytes of l2 cache, and it's common nowadays for even laptops and cellphones to have weird multi-gigabyte memories as the level in the memory hierarchy below l3 cache or even l2 cache; they just don't call it cache, and they use nonvolatile memory for the level below that

also, of the machines i listed, only tianhe-1 will have any particular trouble with earthquakes

Tianhe-1 is a lot of Xeons, Nvidias, and some SPARC-like CPUs. It's not a single image machine with a gigantic shared pool of memory, but a cluster of 7000-ish nodes with very fast interconnects, managed with SLURM. In that sense, these supercomputers are somewhat boring - they are a very large cluster of relatively mundane machines. In that regard, an ARM Mac is more interesting because CPUs and GPUs share memory and you don't need to copy it over a PCIe bus.

Cerebras is a tour de force, but it's far from a general purpose computer. What it does, it does well, but you won't see it doing transactional workloads.

this is the same kind of error as saying that an arm mac is somewhat boring because it's a large cluster of relatively mundane logic gates and capacitors

you won't see a mainframe running crysis either

Apple's M-series, in particular their humongous reorder buffer, is really cool, but IBM's Telum processor with its revolutionary distributed virtual cache architecture and on-chip inference accelerator (with a latency so low it allows AI-fraud detection during transactions) and 5+ GHz base clock, is on a different league, along with all the other little nice things, such as the multiple smaller computers that allow the CPUs to run user code and as little as possible of everything else.

They are, of course, built for different uses.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/mainframe-ibm-z16-telum

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16924/did-ibm-just-preview-th...

Any normal PC or server will continue working during an earthquake. Source: working as a sysadmin/programmer/jack-of-all-trades in Japan for almost 5 years, I have seen many earthquakes, but never a PC or server crashing because of it. Oh, and my workplace has a supercomputer, it also survives earthquakes just fine.

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