You know as well as I do, that it is very hard to justify mainframes just on hardware cost. But when you consider the manpower cost and use of the "white" area along with environmentals, there is justification. And if you can throw in the cost of software licenses, so much the better.
Of course if the cost of manpower, isn't a concern, forget about all computers and get a building full of clerks with pencils <G>.
And as I've said in one of the past posts on this thread, that I've always been of the opinion that CPU intensive workloads really were not suitable for Linux/390. But that guy running 7 images on 9 IFL engines (that to me, fits the description of CPU intensive), does have me wondering.
For the last year, I have talked up putting Linux images on the mainframe. And if they become too resource hungry, we can move them to another platform, but with the 7 images on 9 IFL engines, apparently being justifiable, I've backed off on that line of justification.
Tom Duerbusch THD Consulting
John Summerfield wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Tom Duerbusch wrote:
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.
What's cheap and what's expensive depends on the workload. People aren't using IA32 CPUs to make super computers because that path's dear. They do it because it's the cheapest way to get the CPU power.
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 But it did open my eyes to "run the numbers" instead of throwing it out just based on an outdated "rule of thumb".
Okay, run these numbers: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ time bin/bm.perl
real 0m3.247s user 0m3.160s sys 0m0.020s [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 6 model : 4 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) Processor stepping : 4 cpu MHz : 1410.211 cache size : 256 KB fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow bogomips : 2811.49
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ cat bin/bm.perl #!/usr/bin/perl #use integer; $i = 0; while ($i < 1000) { $j = 0; while ($j < 10000) { ++$j; } ++$i; }
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$
This is on a cheap box bought on price. Well, it did have to be an Athlon, and I did want an Asus motherboard.
If you want a longer comparison, here's one with "while ($i < 1000)" [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ time bin/bm.perl
real 0m31.986s user 0m31.610s sys 0m0.100s [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$
See you our CPU stacks up against mine.
--
Cheers John.
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