[email protected] (Mike Schwab) writes: > Umm, isn't that the Internet? Mainframes, Servers, and PCs able to > access almost anything.
re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013j.html#59 Mainframe vs Server - The Debate Continues major forces attempted to prevent it from happening ... and when they couldn't completely stop it ... they attempted to co-op it and reframe it Grid Computing; Hook enough computers together and what do you get? A new kind of utility that offers supercomputer processing on tap. http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/401444/grid-computing/ from above: Back in the 1980s, the National Science Foundation created the NSFnet: a communications network intended to give scientific researchers easy access to its new supercomputer centers. Very quickly, one smaller network after another linked in-and the result was the Internet as we now know it. The scientists whose needs the NSFnet originally served are barely remembered by the online masses. ... snip ... we were originally suppose to get $20M to hook together the NSF supercomputer centers ... then congress cut the budget, several other things happened ... and then NSF finally releases RFP. Internal politics prevented us from bidding ... director of NSF tried to help ... including writting a letter to the company, copying the CEO ... but that just made the internal politics worse (as did comments that what we already had running was at least 5yrs ahead of all RFP responses). some old email working with NSF leading up to NSFNET http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet the communication group was spreading lots of misinformation internally ... even claims that it could run NSFNET over VTAM/SNA. One of the people on the distribution list collected up a lot of the misinformation emails and forwarded it to us ... heavily redacted copy of what he forwarded http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email870109 I had hsdt project with T1 and faster links ... some past posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt recent discussion in a.f.c. of HSDT project where 1960s 2701 was last mainframe product supporting T1 ... and that condition of some of the HSDT funding ... I had to also install some series/1 with zirpel cards (special FSD T1 support developed for the federal market) http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2013j.html#37 otherwise there wasn't any standard T1 product support. The NSFNET RFP called for T1 links (in large part because I was already running T1 and faster links). The winning RFP response didn't actually install T1 links ... it installed 440kbit/sec links ... and then somewhat to create facade of meeting the letter of the RFP ... they had T1 trunks with telco multiplexors. I made snide remarks that if they went on the basis of the faster trunk that might carry a NSFNET 440kbit/sec link ... they might possibly even claim it was T5. past posts mentioning NSFNET http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#nsfnet another way of co-opting the infrastructure was that the first mainframe TCP/IP product ... got approx. 44kbytes/sec aggregate sustained using nearly 3090 CPU. I did the software changes for RFC1044 support and in some tuning tests at Cray Research got sustained channel speeds between 4341 and Cray ... using only modest amount of 4341 cpu (possibly 500 times improvement in number of bytes moved per instruction executed). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
