On 5/11/19 8:14 PM, Charles Mills wrote:
The mainframe seems to me to have also some "architectural" advantages.
It's my understanding that the mainframe has security related features in the hardware that some other architectures lack.
It seems to support a denser "clustering."
Please elaborate what you mean by "clustering".
It does not seem to me that there is anything in the Windows/Linux world that duplicates the advantages of 100 or so very-closely-coupled (sharing all main storage potentially) CPUs.
It's not Windows or Linux, but I'm fairly sure that Connection Machines from Thinking Machines qualify as a single machine with 100 (or more) processors.
Check out the SpiNNaker Project. They are (were in 2015) working on a 1,000,000 core machine. They show a functioning 100,000 core machine in the video. I'm not sure what OS they are running, but I'd be sort of surprised if it's not Linux.
Link - Silicon Brain: 1,000,000 ARM cores - Computerphile - https://youtu.be/2e06C-yUwlc According to Wikipedia, the million core milestone has been achieved.
Sure, you can link a thousand Windows or Linux 8-way servers on a super-fast net, and it is fine for some things -- incredibly powerful for some of them,
I'm not at liberty to say how many, but my $EMPLOYER has some clusters with staggering numbers of computers in them.
There are also some Cray systems that function as an extremely large NUMA computer.
but it seems there are some things the mainframe architecture is inherently better at.
I'd be curious to learn what a mainframe can do that these clusters can't do.
Sure, the mainframe may be far better optimized. But that doesn't render other things incapable of doing the work.
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