Why Do Mainframes Still Exist? What's Inside One? 40TB, 200+ Cores, AI, and more!
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as an accessible tour of modern mainframes that compares them sensibly to ordinary server setups.
What it is
Dave Plummer tours the IBM z16 mainframe from design through factory assembly, test lab, accelerators and water cooling. He explains why mainframes still exist and what makes them reliable.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2023 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec virgulino · 2024-09 · on “Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy”
"Why Do Mainframes Still Exist? What's Inside One? 40TB, 200+ Cores, AI, and more! - Dave explores the IBM z16 mainframe from design to assembly and testing. What's inside a modern IBM z16 mainframe that makes it relevant today?" - by Dave Plummer. This is an amazing 23-minute video by the Microsoft programmer who developed the Windows NT Task Manager, among other things. He visits IBM and talks to engineers about the Telum chip architecture (Hot Chips 2023), used in the z16 mainframe. Special attention is paid to the cache. [this video]
Recommends bane · 2023-12 · on “The Rise and Fall of the 'IBM Way'”
Great comment. IBM is as IBM wants to be. I don't think there's a mystery to it and they've ended up on an evolutionary path that can't be reversed. To wit, I just watched a long form video [1] on the passion that goes into IBM mainframes including some interesting clips of various physical robustness tests of the assembled systems. It reminded me of watching clips from various space programs where a largely full-up untested rocket had to put humans into orbit without blowing up. Another revolution that's occurred, but IBM chose not to really follow (asterisk) is the idea that you assume some percentage of your hardware will fail (instead of trying to make it never die) -- then you engineer
Recommends Tor3 · 2024-02 · on “New IBM LinuxONE 4 Express – Rack-mounted pre-configured Linux mainframe”
Check out this youtube video: [this video] It does a reasonably good job at comparing mainframes to a regular server setup. It's not about SPEC or GFLOPs etc.
Cites Keyframe · 2024-02 · on “New IBM LinuxONE 4 Express – Rack-mounted pre-configured Linux mainframe”
Dave Plummer recently did a tour: [this video] It's definitely intriguing if it were.. I don't know, available to tinker with?