Maybe not for zOS, but I personally think Linux on Z (with DPM fully "featured out" for automatic machine management) can be a beast. If only IBM or independent reviewers ran actual comparisons of costs, density, etc.
zDNN on z16 chip is "ok", but do note that this is again a whole bunch of years where new developers / vendors have to switch to writing compatible code. I think the main purpose of zDNN is to stop data going out of MF for all the analytics & new stuff. One of the biggest things with GPU farm is that they're not busy all of the time. Seen posts from many** on Twitter saying the same. So justifying the cost of them just sitting there is... tough. An alternative of using cloud GPUs means moving your data around... not exactly simple, considering the minefield of cloud ingress/egress costs & billing in general. Something like WLM to manage up to 20 GPU PCIe cards on Z can make it manageable. So... although zOS may never see it. Mainframes running Linux on Z with GPUs seems valuable. IBM does have an array or two with NVIDIA GPUs onboard - in the Spectrum line - for analytics & AI workloads. many = noteworthy voices of people in the GPU compute space, doing ML or analytics. - KB ------- Original Message ------- On Monday, August 22nd, 2022 at 2:58 AM, Charles Mills <[email protected]> wrote: > You would offload a lot of the (expensive) Z cycles to the GPU, right? > > Still, I agree, hard for me to see this flying. It pains me to say this, but > we just don't seem to hear people saying "I would love to put business > process 'X' on the mainframe." Don't flame me -- I love the Z and the > mainframe has been very, very good to me -- but what we hear mostly it seems > is "I would love to get this business process OFF the mainframe." > > Although, isn't @Dave's idea more or less what IBM has done with AI and the > z16? Coupled specialized processors to a Z? > > Charles > > > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of Phil Smith III > Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2022 1:37 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: Once upon a time...... > > Dave Jones wrote about attaching GPU cards to a Z to make it a super-number > cruncher. > > > > What's the problem you're trying to solve? Cheap Intel MIPS being too > inexpensive? Seriously, I've never heard anyone say "I'd put this > numeric-intensive application on zSystems but they're just too slow". No, > they say "Intel cycles are cheap: let's use an array with GPU cards > attached". > > > > There might be a use case or two, but I'd be (pleasantly!) astonished to > find more than a handful. > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
