I have a question about these systems, both z and not z.
What is the current bus width supported?
At the G3 level for "z" the CPU-RAM bus was 256 bytes wide, as I
recall.
For IOP to RAM it was 64 bytes wide.
For the systems I run (off the shelf stuff for Linux and windows)
the bus is still at 64bits (8 bytes). Yes it has bus mastering,
and pathing to allow certain adapter cards to use 8bit "channels"....
z/Arch POP has instructions for interrogating the bus sizes. I
haven't had the time or opportunity to write any tests using this
to find out what those bus sizes are it would report on.
Steve Thompson
On 5/22/2023 7:52 AM, David Crayford wrote:
On 22/5/2023 1:26 pm, Attila Fogarasi wrote:
Good point about NUMA....and it is still a differentiator and
competitive
advantage for IBM z.
How is NUMA a competitive advantage for z? Superdomes use Intel
UltraPath Interconnect (UPI) links that can do glueless NUMA.
IBM bought Sequent 20+ years ago to get their
excellent NUMA technology, and has since built some very
clever cache
topology and management algorithms. AMD has historically been
crippled in
real-world performance due to cache inefficiencies.
What historical generation of AMD silicon was crippled? The
EPYC supports up to 384MB of L3 cache and the specs and
benchmarks suggest the chiplet architecture can easily handle
the I/O.
10 years ago CICS was at 30 billion transactions per day, so
volume has tripled in 10 years, during the massive growth of
cloud.
Healthy indeed.
I have a different perspective on what constitutes healthy.
Here in Australia, I've had the opportunity to meet architects
from various banks who are actively involved in or have
completed the process of migrating the read side of their CICS
transactions to distributed systems. They have embraced
technologies like CDC and streaming platforms such as Apache
Kafka and distributed data stores such as Cassandra and
MongoDb. This shift has been primarily driven by disruptive
technologies like mobile banking pushing up mainframe software
costs.
This is a common architectural pattern.
https://www.conferencecast.tv/talk-29844-nationwide-building-society-building-mobile-applications-and-a-speed-layer-with-mongodb#.talkPage-header
On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 2:56 PM David
Crayford<[email protected]> wrote:
Sent again in plain text. Apple mail is too clever for it’s
own good!
On 22 May 2023, at 12:46 pm, David
Crayford<[email protected]> wrote:
On 21 May 2023, at 12:52 pm, Howard
Rifkind<[email protected]>
wrote:
Hundreds of PC type servers still can’t handle the huge
amount of data
like a mainframe can.
Of course, that's an absurd statement! By "PC type," I assume
you're
referring to x86? We can easily break this down. First things
first, let's
forget about the "hundreds" requirement. A 32 single socket
system is
enough to match up.
AMD EPYC is the poster child for single socket servers,
running its novel
chiplet technology on a 5nm process node. AMD's infinity
interconnects are
capable of massive I/O bandwidth. You can learn more about it
here:
https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/infinity-architecture.
Each socket
can have a maximum of 96 cores, but even if we use a
conservative 64 cores
per socket, that's a scale-out of 2048 cores. AMD also has
accelerators for
offload encryption/compression, etc.
Over in Intel land, the Ice Lake server platform is not quite as
impressive, but the QPI (Quick Path Interconnect) yet again
handles huge
bandwidth. Intel also has accelerators such as their QAT,
which can either
be on-die SoC or a PCIe card. It's not too dissimilar to zEDC
but with the
advantage that it supports all popular compression formats
and not just
DEFLATE. You can find more information here:
https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-quick-assist-technology-overview.html
.
A more apples-to-apples comparison would be the HP Superdome
Flex, which
is a large shared memory system lashed together with NUMA
interconnects,
with a whopping 32 sockets and a maximum core count of 896 on
a single
vertically integrated system. HP Enterprise has technology
such as nPars,
which is similar to PR/SM. They claim 99.999% availability on
a single
system and even beyond when clustered.
On the Arm side, it gets even more interesting as the
hyperscalers and
cloud builders are building their own kit. Although this
technology is
almost certainly the growth area of non-x86 workloads, you
can find more
details about it here:
https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/05/18/ampere-gets-out-in-front-of-x86-with-192-core-siryn-ampereone/
.
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Regards,
Steve Thompson
VS Strategies LLC
Westfield IN
972-983-9430 cell
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