With IBM's acquisition of SPSS several years ago & the recent acquisition of
Netezza (for use as an "attached processor" for computational workloads on
zSeries), IBM's z/Series intentions seem to have changed. After the AS
("Application System") disaster (early eighties, great demo, not scalable, ADRS
based if I recall), I hope the performance concerns are addressed. Even the
DB2 folk no longer accept a performance hit with a new release ("more code &
features take more resources" was a mantra at IDUG for years, finally falling
flat with V8.)
In particular, with the minimization of locking, data "above the bar,"
increased use of zIIP & general performance improvements, analytics with DB2 on
zSeries might be cost effective for "big data" in a shared workload environment.
See (unfortunately marketing oriented):
http://www.clabbyanalytics.com/uploads/zBAfinalfinalfinal.pdf
and
http://berniespang.com/2012/06/08/clients-chose-ibm-system-z-for-analytics-over-teradata-and-oracle-exadata/
It would have been interesting if they had put something like this together for
the 2010 census data in the way SAS did
for the 1980 data, but there's plenty more data sources against which these
marketing claims will soon be tested.
>> --Original Message-----
>>From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On
>>Behalf Of Mark Post
>>Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2012 1:07 PM
>>To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU
>>Subject: Re: zEC12, and previous generations, "why?" type question - GPU
>>computing.
>>> On 9/5/2012 at 12:45 PM, "McKown, John" <john.mck...@healthmarkets.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> I guess that I should preface this with another question. Does anybody
>> use a z for heavy numeric computation anymore? Or has that all gone to
>> Intel and Power boxes? Why is that? If it is because the z architecture is
>> "not good"
>> at numeric computation, I have a question.
>As has been pointed out in another thread here, the dollar cost per
>instruction is much higher on System z than other >architectures. So for
>purely computational workloads, although System z may have a faster CPU than
>the other >architectures, it costs more for the same amount of computation. A
>lot of high performance computing is "restartable" >in that if a computation
>node fails, starting that piece of work over from the beginning isn't hard.
>Most of the >qualities that are built into System z aren't needed for that
>type of work, so no need to spend the big bucks for it.
>Mark Post
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