> I've recently had a number of IBM web pages pointed out to me > that talk > about zSeries boxes being useful in grid computing.
390's are useful in grids, but primarily as storage management nodes and as control nodes. As Mark points out, 390s don't produce enough raw cycles to be very interesting as computational engines, however, they do have interesting driver applications that could initiate and employ high-performance grid farms to great benefit (think about things like risk analysis that use large data sets, and need raw cycles to chew things up). > David Boyes has been active with Globus on Linux/390, and I can easily > imagine workload that would be a good fit for that. What I'm not sure > about, and perhaps David can comment on this, is if grid > computing workload > and grid nodes can be characterized properly to make the appropriate > workload get sent to Linux/390 nodes. With the current gatekeeper/broker and "clumping" of machines and resources (for lack of a better word), workloads can be directed to what is effectively a group of resources with particular attributes. Applications can specify the attributes necessary for execution of a particular task, and part of the job of the broker process is to locate available resources that possess the necessary attributes and direct the task to the appropriate place. If configured correctly, the Linux Globus code registers itself as biased toward I/O intensive applications and indicates that it is not a good choice for computationally intensive tasks. The real interest is allowing a 390 application to initiate and control processes running in the Intel grid.
