IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/45808.wss

by zmonkeyz • 12 years ago

102 97 12 years ago

www-03.ibm.com

lancewiggs• 12 years ago

It's fascinating to see the rhetoric focussing on mobile transactions being the main driver of demand. While it's certainly huge, there are still a lot of other uses.

pantulis• 12 years ago

I was surprised that the word "omnichannel" is missing.

_RPM2• 12 years ago

literally every device used by consumers today can be traced back to IBM.

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

How so? How does an ARM powered smartphone or tablet trace back to IBM?

_RPM2• 12 years ago

When you press the main button. BOOM! Interrupt! That is one example. They even had virtualization in the 80's on System / 370 long VMWare came out.

serf2• 12 years ago

Well, off the top of my head, and unlikely to be the only association..

IBM licensed the 286 for the IBM PC/AT. Acorn wanted to use the 286 for the Archimedes, but Intel would not allow licensing. This forced Acorn to create their own processor, resulting in the first RISC based consumer PC.

Perhaps that snowballs into our current tech environment.

trsohmers• 12 years ago

It's a lot easier to claim that all modern processors (that are based on a load/store architecture... All RISC chips, basically... and that includes x86) trace back to the CDC 6600, probably Seymour Cray's most direct and influential gift to the world of computing.

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

That's a fairly content free release as these come. Nothing about the actual architecture, clearly aimed at managers rather than techies, IBM does enterprise sales very well. But of course I'm more interested in the nitty gritty details (though I'll likely never be in a position to pull the trigger on a purchase like this). Funny how Linux is mentioned in the press release, and other platforms don't even rate a mention.

spydum• 12 years ago

Very true.. Though I recall the power7 stuff being released years ago as a very tech heavy event, and yet it seemed to go down without much of an impact as well (though the aix guys I worked with were convinced it was game changing). I think people who are invested (culturally/mentally)in ibm will continue to buy ibm (and no doubt be successful). I just don't see them growing any new markets.

Afforess• 12 years ago

though the aix guys I worked with were convinced it was game changing

I was talking to an ibmer a while ago and AIX was mentioned. We agreed the platform had technical merits, and on a pure platform level was superior to x32/x64 but the network effects of commodity hardware had already won the platform game. No one writes software for any other platforms but intel/amd64. AIX lost for the battle, similar to the reasons betamax lost to VHS.

erglkjahlkh• 12 years ago

I have participated in sales, and I did not want to get into hours long discussion (boring, and not really important) about what Power/AIX offers so I boiled it down for potential customers like this:

If you want the best with insane price level, buy into Power/AIX. If you are not really sure, please don't. You need to train administrators (with larger setups) - or prepare to shell in a lot of money, the hardware contains nasty licensing surprises, the hardware is rather expensive, and so on. When you get it running, it's insanely powerful indeed, and the platform itself nearly never screws up (if you tested properly for Monday parts), and the virtualization is insanely good in practice.

Some potential customers have bought Power/AIX, some not. The ones that did are still years after customers, and to my knowledge pretty happy. I believe IBM is actually gaining customers. Slowly, but they are. Those that made the choice knew what they got into, and are not going to change their views.

TallGuyShort4• 12 years ago

Never mind this specific release - you never hear about other platforms on System Z period. Linux got a s/390 port quite early on, and SUSE and Red Hat both support it, but no, Windows, Mac, BSD, etc. are unheard of in this world. You can mess with Fedora / Debian images for that architecture on your desktop using Hercules.

cbd1984• 12 years ago

Funny how Linux is mentioned in the press release, and other platforms don't even rate a mention.

Because the other OSes which run on the hardware are so obscure that non-technies would never have heard of them. I'm morally certain CMS and z/OS (or whatever MVS is called these days) and VM are still in use, but Linux has the penguin and the media coverage. Therefore, it gets the inches.

wmf4• 12 years ago

The architecture can always be found in the redbooks: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedpieceAbstracts/s... http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedpieceAbstracts/s...

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

I've found some specs:

- up to 141 configurable processors

- new 22nm 8-core processor chip@5GHZ

- 110GIPS

- Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) support

- On chip cryptographic and compression coprocessors

- up to 10 TB of memory (configured as 'memory raid', RAIM)

PDF is here: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/zs/en/zsd03035usen/...

jlarocco• 12 years ago

I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe.

Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), a vector processing model providing instruction level parallelism, to speed workloads such as analytics and mathematical modeling. For example, COBOL 5.2 and PL/I 4.5 exploit SIMD and improved floating point enhancements to deliver improved performance over and above that provided by the faster processor.

Most people would consider COBOL and PL/I to be laughably out of date languages from the 60s and 70s. But here's a new machine with 10 TB of RAM, and the release notes are quick to point out new features for COBOL and PL/I. Go figure.

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

The specs from 2045 will still mention COBOL, PL/I and of course Java.

m_mueller4• 12 years ago

I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe.

Well they are. These things are built for a specific audience and it so happens that they are still willing to spend money on this, otherwise it wouldn't be made, especially not by IBM that is otherwise quick to disband business units that don't make heaps of money.

In my research I'm using an even older language: Fortran. Believe it or not, but in a field that is less narrow and specific than you would think[1], there's still no real replacement for (modern) Fortran.

[1] numeric applications that need to get close to the hardware's peak performance, written in a higher level language than C that is usable by non-CS-graduates.

graycat4• 12 years ago

In about 1993 or so, at IBM, PL/I was being supported by just one guy! If they have a new release, then they may have put some more people on it!

PL/I is not totally out of date! E.g., it has some really sweetheart scope of names rules. The On Conditions are generally nicer than Try-Catch, e.g., if in a code block A and do a Goto out of it to a statement label in a containing code block B (it's fair to call PL/I a block structured language), then the stack of that task (in some ways nicer than just a thread) is rolled (popped as in popping a stack, which is essentially what happens) back to the context of the last time block B was active.

Block B can have a function F that inherits names defined in the blocks that contain B, and block B can call a function G, pass F as an entry variable, and function G can call it's parameter for function F, function F can execute and access all the variables it has access to that function G may not. That can be nice. I used it once when scheduling the fleet for FedEx.

Can have tasks, like threads. Can allocate some storage as, say, controlled. Then when the task ends, that allocated storage is freed. That can be nice -- nice way to stop memory leaks when have to kill a task.

PL/I has structures which replace much of the utility of classes. And the structures, with arrays of structures of arrays of structures of arrays, etc., are much faster than instances of classes because all the addressing is just a fairly nice generalization of simple old array addressing without pointers.

Such a structure can be based which means that can allocate one and get back a pointer to it. So, that is a lot like allocating an instance of a class. B can be part of a structure A, and B can be defined to be like structure C -- so, can get some inheritance.

The flat file I/O is much sweeter than what is in C and was brought over to, say, Visual Basic .NET or C#.

PL/I will convert nearly any data type to nearly any other, e.g., something like a cast in the C family of languages, but the documentation says in very full and fine detail just how each conversion is done.

There's a relatively powerful pre-processor macro language executed by the compiler that can be used to generate a lot of source code -- can be nice.

If they have tried to upgrade PL/I, say, to 64 bit addressing, maybe more on event handling, some collection classes, a sweet DB/2 or RDBMS interface (it always had some DB syntax and semantics in the language), then it could be a nice language even now.

It's been said that the golden age of language design was the 1960s. C was designed after PL/I and was a really big step down so that it could compile on a DEC mini-computer with 8 KB of main memory while PL/I always had at least 64 KB.

On VM/CMS and MVS, PL/I didn't have access to TCP/IP, but C did, so I wrote some C code callable from PL/I that gave PL/I access to TCP/IP. Used it a little! Maybe now TCP/IP is closer to being native to the language.

I was in the group at IBM's Watson lab that did the expert system shell KnowledgeTool that was implemented as a pre-processor to PL/I. One night I stayed up until dawn and coded the logic that made rule subroutines fast, functional, etc. The key was to keep a crucial part of our run time software and the user's rule subroutine on the stack of dynamic descendancy. Gee, I got an award! The hourly rate for that night was actually relatively good!

PL/I doesn't have to be so bad!

ExpiredLink• 12 years ago

I always feel like mainframes are off in some weird parallel universe.

This parallel universe is called reality and you live in the matrix.

noselasd• 12 years ago

If you want to learn a bit more about mainframes, this podcast http://www.se-radio.net/2012/03/episode-184-the-mainframe-wi... has a lot of great info.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

I am on an iSeries, the little brother to the z. We have a pair of zSeries as well. COBOL and RPG (its fully free form by the way, looks like any other language) are both very much rooted in business logic, in particular math. Their number handling is well known and without inconsistencies of many newer languages. That and the code base is well established and works. Throw in that memory leaks are nearly non existent, code is independent of changes to the microprocessors and your investment always comes forward.

Seriously, we have code whose originals can be traced to systems long dead. Yet code is not stagnate, full SQL integration exists for most language, there are many ways to get to the web. That and you would be surprised at the number of companies who use these machines simply for one reason above all, reliability. Our last crash was a site failure and even then we rolled to the DR site instantly.

laxatives• 12 years ago

Maybe I'm out of the loop, but isn't 22nm big, SIMD available on almost everything, and dedicated crypto and compression more or less ubiquitous?

Sanddancer• 12 years ago

22nm is pretty close to the smallest; the fabs are ramping up for 14 in intel's case, and 16 for global foundries' case, but you're not gonna find much on the shelves right now with a smaller foundry. While SIMD's everywhere, dedicated crypto is fairly recent, with IBM notably doing elliptic curve acceleration, and dedicated compression is something that is new. On the other side, most of the CPU improvements they are touting are things everyone else is doing -- wider SIMD units, more cache, etc.

However, that's ignoring what's made a mainframe fast and expensive for the past several decades. Mainframes still slaughter all comers when it comes to I/O, and this is no different. When you've got up to 320 fibre links available, you're gonna have no problem keeping those processors busy.

wmf4• 12 years ago

Those features are new for COBOL and PL/I (as other commenters mentioned). Good luck getting Intel or ARM to care about your dusty decks full of BCD math.

noahdesu• 12 years ago

I'm curious what one might expect something like this to cost.

wmf4• 12 years ago

For the previous generation: "IBM doesn’t publish prices for mainframes but the word on the street is that it is around $80,000 per core for a [Linux/Java core] compared to $400,000 per core for regular [cores] that mostly run z/OS" http://www.enterprisetech.com/2013/10/09/ibm-slashes-hardwar... I'm not sure whether that's the amortized total price or just the activation after you've already bought the machine.

aries19803• 12 years ago

110 GIPS is not too much for 141 CPU. My Core i7 4700HQ CPU dos 3 GIPS/core at 2.9 GHz.

dfox3• 12 years ago

It depends on what kinds of instructions you count. I strongly suspect that your 3GIps number is only register-to-register integer arithmetic, while the 110GIps is some IBM-ish "mixed workload" that uses most of the System/z instruction set. (which includes things like "get CRC32 of this buffer" as one instruction)

gojock• 12 years ago

yes but buying 3 of them gets you 3 machines that can do 3GIPS, not one machine that can do 9GIPS

halayli6• 12 years ago

what's a transaction in this context?

jacquesm10• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_processing_system

halayli6• 12 years ago

I know that but this is a very general definition of TPS. How many CPU cycles a transaction requires? It varies on the transaction of course.

So I am wondering why they use TPS as a unit when it can be anything.

ivan_ah• 12 years ago

The part about the in-memory analytics reminds me a lot of the SAP HANA spiel:

    Transaction Database --> copy -->  analytics db   = slow
    
    In-memory transactions with built-in analytics    = fast

I totally understand the value of analytics and BI applications, but does it all have to be realtime? And what "mobile analytics" are they going to compute exactly? Forget analytics, I can tell you what mobile users are doing right now---they're all playing candy crush.

chime• 12 years ago

Their customers are not King.com or most techie startups. Their customers are insurance companies, banks, and other financial behemoths.

My bank recently alerted me because I swiped my credit card at one gas station away from home but did not buy gas (the pump was out of gas) and then swiped again at another gas station in a 3mi radius within 30 minutes (obviously since I needed gas).

Their system picked up these two transactions, figured out they were both gas stations, geo-located them to be out of my area, calculated the distance to be close enough to reason it was just one person (and not my wife using her card elsewhere), and triggered an alert because the first transaction was really just a $1 pre-auth with no actual charge.

While none of this is really that complex if you built a fraud-detection system from ground up with these requirements, imagine running this rule on a few hundred million transactions per day. Now add in a thousand more fraud-detection rules, scoring algorithms, and pattern recognition for uncommon usage. Then hook it up to the mobile app to further reduce chances of fraudulent usage by tracking user's location, businesses silently checked-in, and alert preferences. IBM is targeting companies that need this.

DonHopkins2• 12 years ago

I thought the customer was always king, and nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

smegel• 12 years ago

The biggest, baddest Linux hypervisor known to mankind.

drKarl2• 12 years ago

While it's an undeniable technological achievement, I don't think it's a good strategical one.

Nowadays you don't create a single monolithic system, really expensive too, which is capable of processing all of your transactions, as it says, like 100 cybermondays every day.

Instead, you have a distributed system, with many cheap, geographically distributed servers, each one capable of a much lower number of transactions, but still quite high today... and also you can spin up new servers as needed, or destroy servers as they are no longer needed, so you control your costs when you don't need as much instead of having a very expensive mainframe 90% underutilized 90% of the time.

pbourke• 12 years ago

Computers, even these, are cheaper than development and opportunity costs for a complex system. Especially if that system has been around for 30+ years and lies at the core of a large business.

jbergens• 12 years ago

But development for mainframes seems to be much more costly than development on pc's. If you need this type of machine you need it, but it will probably cost you a lot to work with it over the years.

brudgers• 12 years ago

The CAP theorem suggests some limits on a distributed systems approach. These matter very much in industries like banking and others involving financial transactions. It's no accident that checking each transaction for credit card fraud is listed as a feature. If there's float, there's an opportunity for arbitrage.

IBM is full of really smart people some of whom work on really hard problems using the principles of Computer science. The z13 wasn't the result of two recent grads pivoting a Yelp for Rabbits startup and the z13 isn't for companies hoping to do a billion transactions a day. It's for those doing it.

7952• 12 years ago

Distributed systems as a whole can still suffer from the same kind of issues that you would expect to see in a monolithic system. Look at how a single bad software update can take down Google or AWS.

At a basic level this kind of sytem gives you lots of low latency bandwidth connecting CPUs to each other and CPUs to storage. That is a useful quality to have and not neccessarily easily repoducible using network and internet connections between servers and data centers.

fragmede• 12 years ago

You say that as if managing a system at Google or AWS or Facebook scale is free. The downtime of individual servers may not matter as much in that architecture, but they each have an army of (costly!) engineers just to keep things running.

To say that the Google 'many-servers' approach is the only valid one is to overstate the trade-offs.

dfox3• 12 years ago

These things tend to be used nowadays as the single source of truth in middle of large distributed systems. When your data represent real value you really need full transactional semantics and when your transactional volume is large enough, buying or renting System z is the cheapest solution.

pdardeau2• 12 years ago

You're regurgitating 'common' wisdom here, but you really should check your assumptions and reality when it comes to current mainframes. IBM's mainframes have a minimum and maximum number of engines (CPU). An engine can be either general purpose (I forget the acronym they use) for use with z/OS, or can be a specialty engine (IFL, zIIP, zAAP). My understanding is that it's the same hardware, just a simple firmware update to tell the engine what 'type' it is. An IFL (what you would use to run Linux under z/VM) is significantly cheaper than the general purpose one used for z/OS. Also, mainframes can be loaded with more engines that what you've paid for -- this is what IBM calls Capacity-On-Demand (COD). So you can temporarily activate additional engines to handle spikes. The zSeries has some fantastic capabilities for Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS). The systems I've been around keep engine utilizations quite high (98/99%) as the norm.

A mainframe is typically partitioned into multiple, smaller systems. This is what IBM calls a Logical Partition (LPAR). This partitioning is done with firmware called PR/SM. This capability has been around since the 3090 (mid to late 80's). Within an LPAR, one typically installs either z/OS or z/VM (there are other systems too, but less commonly used this way). Running in an LPAR is 'bare metal'. Within z/VM, there's typically a mix of guest types, but this is where Linux would typically be configured to run. z/VM has some pretty impressive capabilities and has been around for a LONG time. It's very stable. The biggest things that you would probably dislike about it are: (1) one uses a 3270 emulator to do day-to-day system-level admin work, (2) it only runs (legally) on real mainframe hardware, and (3) much of IBM's jargon is dated and would unfamiliar to people coming from x86.

The modern mainframe hardware and software has an impressive feature set for virtualized networking (networking is all software defined and runs within the box). This means you can set up hundreds or thousands of Linux guests and have them on networks that are all virtualized within z/VM. And of course, z/VM guests can be created and spun-up on demand and stopped on-demand. This has been there for decades.

IBM now has support for OpenStack in z/VM. From what I've perused, it seems to be quite slick. Assuming it all works as advertised, this would make folks coming from x86 feel much more at home.

Many seem to think that distributed systems are so much cheaper. You can't just think of it as the price of the rack server though. You have to include everything in the mix to understand the total cost: hardware, software, networking, people (headcount and consulting), power and cooling, floorspace, and intangibles (such as capabilities). When you do the math, mainframes running Linux under z/VM are often fairly economical (YMMV).

Once you throw off the stereotypes and objectively dig into the modern mainframe, you might be surprised at what you find.

drKarl2• 12 years ago

Excellent explanation! Specially the fact that within a mainframe you can create hundreds or even thousands of virtualized linux guests, which can be created or destroyed on demand. That makes for a much more compelling use case!

anentropic• 12 years ago

YES BUT WHY IS THE FONT SO SMALL?

twic• 12 years ago

That's IBM's new 9-pixel type process.

easytiger• 12 years ago

z13 is the first system to make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale

Or you know, any kind of transaction because there is no difference.

Fuck I hate marketing.

feld• 12 years ago

The "encryption" buzzword is worthless without details. And I wonder if they'll stand behind their product if their crypto flavor of choice is broken and needs to be changed. Otherwise that's an expensive brick of swiss cheese.

wmf4• 12 years ago

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/security/zec12cry... (previous generation) http://www-03.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/

One reason for industry standards is that they distribute risk across the whole industry. So if NIST crypto is broken the entire industry goes down together; one company wouldn't have a competitive disadvantage.

ask123• 12 years ago

I have been working in the mainframe industry for over 5 years now and i know tons of company (government, banks, insurance and others) are still running mainframe. I picked this field because i saw the opportunity of how alot of the old folks are retiring and companies are willing to pay alot of money to get young folks to join and learn the mainframe. Honestly its not even that hard as long as you are willing to learn.... what are your thoughts about it? If someone was willing to train people, would people be interested in it?

IBM Launches Z13 Mainframe

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