On Thu, 17 Feb 2011, Cranky Frankie wrote:
- When you see Watson being rack after rack of servers, for an old-timer like me who remembers the mainframes, it's still kind of a shock.
Not so much any more. Even the dinky little 12 core machine I am putting together can have up to 256G of memory. But I'm only starting with 16G, and upgrade later to 64G when it's time to start running production. Speaking of memory, in 1987, when I retired from IBM, only one mainframe in Pok had more than 16MB of memory, and it was 32MB. None of the other msinframes had more than 16MB. On my 80287 pc, I had 16MB of memory, and ran APL, which used it all in one workspace. I was able to read in 150,000 line listing files and do string seraches on the entire collection. It saved me an enormous amount of time.
- You wonder if the OS was AIX, their version of Unix, or something else.
AIX 6.x drives the powerpc.
- Clearly they had everything indexed and in core, but you wonder what the database architecture was: - relational as in some version of DB2, or hierarchical like IMS or even XML, or a linked list, or something built one-off for this like Google's "Big Table"
I don't think you will find any linked lists in there. The 100+ powerpcs have a combined memory of about 15 TB. It is all in memory. Each powerpc, at least 32 core, has at least 256G of memory. Lex _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Mar 2 - MHVLUG 8th Anniversary - Show and Tell Apr 6 - Introduction to IPv6 May 4 - Inkscape
