According to foreign media reports, recently, IBM released its Z13 mainframe platform, the new product equipped with a variety of chip hardware innovation technology to achieve mobility, analytical applications and security-driven workload acceleration. The Z13 system can support up to 10TB of memory and up to 8000 virtual servers.
John Birtles, director of IBM System Z Business Development and Technology, explains: "We have invested more than $1 billion on this platform, and we have more than 500 patents around the Z13 platform, which uses a lot of innovative technology." ”
Chip
From the chip point of view, Z13 uses 22 nm technology, which is a technology upgrade of the 32 nm process used previously on the EC12 host system. The new chip provides improved bandwidth and increases the number of instructions that can be delivered and completed within a single calculation cycle. IBM also introduced synchronous multi-threaded (SMT) technology on the processor.
Birtles said: "Synchronous multithreading is the same way as the operating system treats multitasking, it requires multiple tasks and is properly provisioned, so that when a task is busy waiting for an action, other tasks can use the processing pipeline." ”
IBM also introduced a single instruction multi-data (SIMD) pattern for vector processing. This vector processing pattern promises to improve parallel processing, an advantage that is particularly useful for analyzing applications.
"Vector processing applies to all types of data, and during the transaction process of the decision-making process, this will help to improve the ability to carry more data," Birtles said. ”
Comparison of Z13 and power
As the new z13 system came into existence, IBM continued to innovate on its power system, which recently updated its power system with the new POWER8 processor. Birtles explains that System Z is often the best choice for customers with high I/O requirements.
"If you have a workload with a higher CPU limit, the customer will typically choose power, but there is a huge amount of space in it, and there are some business behaviors that drive customers to choose." ”
For example, POWER8 supports the Ubuntu Linux operating system, which is not supported by System Z. In contrast, Oracle's products do not fully support Linux running on power, but it supports System Z.
Linux on the Z13
One of Z13 's main operating systems is Linux, which can run on new hosts in a variety of different modes. Birtles explained that z13 configured the LPAR logical partition and the built-in hypervisor PRISM.Z/VM technology runs on a machine-defined partition, and then a client Linux operating system can run on it.
Birtles also said: "Some members of our Linux community choose to run only in the available machine partitions, and many will choose to run on Z/VM, which provides more granular choices for a single virtual machine, and provides a more robust commitment to available resources in more memory space than hardware partitioning." ”
In terms of the positioning of System z, it provides additional virtualization capabilities for Linux users who have already used power maturity capabilities. For example, System Z is developed to support KVM virtualization, and the purpose of providing KVM is to provide customers who already have a KVM environment with the ability to migrate this environment to the point where they can run KVM on System Z.
In general, one of the main messages that IBM is trying to convey through Z13 's release is that the mainframe is at the maturity of the product life cycle and will be a vibrant platform over the next few years.
"We celebrated the 50 birthday of IBM mainframe in 2014, and the launch of this new platform shows that we have a very good start on the next 50 years of innovation," Birtles said.
- This article is from: Linux Tutorial Network
IBM pushes new mainframe Z13 China market January 27 release