> I've heard about "vector facilities", i really dont know much > about it, > only that they are designed to provide "help" with arithmetic > operations, > and things like that, maybe that could help with cpu bound task?
Not really. They no longer exist on modern hardware -- they were part of the 3090 and ESA hardware generation, and were specific to operations that performed the same task on multiple contiguous elements (things like multiplying array elements by a scalar in Fortran programs). > On the other hand the idea of "clustering" mainframes with > intels could > help with that tasks, or maybe its only my brain telling me > that i need to > sleep :-( It's an excellent idea and it works well. See my presentation and recent pubs on exactly that topic. It drives the need for some additional function in the zSeries hardware that isn't present yet, but it can be done very effectively for specific applications.
