The part of offloading cycles to a cheaper platform, is that we would be offloading to a more expensive platform (intel). Not that the Intel box isn't cheap, but the economic reasons for server consolidations is to get away from these "cheap" boxes.
Until a few months ago, I've had the impression that putting cpu type loads on the mainframe wasn't economical compared to putting the same loads on Intel or Sun platforms. But then I start hearing about some other sites, one that had 7 Linux images in LPAR mode, using 9 processors. Apparently, it was economically justifiable. I still don't understand how. But it did open my eyes to "run the numbers" instead of throwing it out just based on an outdated "rule of thumb". I'm sure there is some room for Intel based cheap mips, but in todays world, I would have to see it to believe it. Next year is a different story. Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 06/18 12:17 PM >>> Greetings. As a newbie to the mainframe environment (my background is mostly linux), I have grown enthusiastic about this superior hardware I knew very little about. Nevertheless, I have always found it a shame that number crunching workloads are not a good match to the mainframe. Grid computing is interesting as a way to make the best of the cheap computing power provided by intel boxes, on the one hand, and the robustness of the mainframe, on the other, opening new avenues for integrating and using various resources with their own strenghts. If i got it right, it seems that applications need to be grid-aware to be able to use it effectively, which makes it a no-no as a short-term solution. And then I had this idea when I was reading about openMosix. For those of you who haven't heard, check the homepage at http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/. In a nutshell, openMosix is a single-image clustering system implemented as a Linux kernel extension and a set of userland tools. You connect multiple IA-32 boxes with a patched kernel and get a linearly scalable cheap supercomputer. Users treat it like a single machine, as processes are migrated to idle(ier) nodes transparently. So what if we could patch a zLinux image kernel and then made it one of the nodes of one of these clusters? If possible, we would have a way to cleanly offload CPU intensive jobs from the linux/mainframe to cheaper external engines. This would get cheap horsepower to the mainframe, transparently, and would still allow for centralized management (filesystems could still reside on DASD). I can think of at least one disadvantage. If an external node breaks, any processes it is running at the moment will be lost, which wouldn't happen on a zLinux image, as far as I know. Any mainframe and VM gurus care to comment? Is there any reason why this can't be done? Do we loose any more reliability features? Am I missing something that makes it totally impractical? Thanks for your patience :) -- jmc
