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Comment by rasur | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious to know what a modern day IBM mainframe can do, just out of idle interest.

Modern mainframes have an optional cryptographic coprocessor addon. The hardware, or cryptocard [1], is specialized to provide high-throughput for common cryptographic functions, including SHA-256. (It does lots more than that too.)

The latest cryptocard available is the Crypto Express5S [2] and is compatible with z13s.

And since modern mainframes can run Linux natively (s390x), you could probably get popular CPU miners to run. Albeit, you'd have to recompile for s390x and provide patches to utilize CPACF [3].

I could never find any SHA-256 hash rates for the Crypto Express5S, but if you really wanted to mine bitcoins on a mainframe, this would be the way to go.

[1]: http://www-03.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/pciecc/overview.s...

[2]: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/z13_specs.html

[3]: https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/linuxonibm/co...

CPU mining hasn't been relevant for years.

I'm hoping Cuckoo Cycle can change that (https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo)

You didn't really understand what he said.

Here you go: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/z13_specs.html

And the microprocessor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z13_(microprocessor)

Thanks for the pointers, it's been a while since I've actually used an IBM mainframe in anger, it's interesting to see what the latest state of things is.

Probably a whole lot worse than custom mining hardware. The custom ASICs are crazy optimized for mining. Unfortunately I don't have access to a modern mainframe to try it out.

Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? You sink that much investment into a mainframe, you're going to be having better things to do with them than mine bitcoin.

Although, yet another idle thought; maybe IBM themselves have 'tested' a machine, if anyone.

EDIT: typos,grammar.

Why on earth would they do that, the depreciation on the machine would be higher than the amount of $ generated that way and that's ignoring the cost of the energy and the facility to host it.

It would make absolutely no sense.

I read 'tested' as a few minutes, for fun, experimental purposes rather than profit.

Yes, that was my intention with 'tested'. I'm sure IBM have the resources to jazz up something a bit more application specific if they really wanted.

You buy a mainframe for the I/O it can do, not the computation (for which you'd want a supercomputer).

Oh I realise that, I used to use them, I do roughly recall their benefits ;)

I was just asking out of idle curiosity, nothing more.

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