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Mainframes (2 products)

[edit] Brief Description

Mainframes run multiple operating systems and operate not as a single computer but as a number of virtual machines. They are typically manufactured by large companies for large-scale computing purposes.

Synonyms: Mainframe Computers, Mainframe Operating Systems

Tags: Mainframe Server Hardware, Virtual Machines

[edit] Wiki description

Contents
Introduction Brief history Usage in various fields and areas Statistics Characteristics and features Mainframe or supercomputer? Most Popular Communities See More

Introduction

	Basically the term "mainframes" comes from a long history of computers that were as big as one room and they were fulfilling various tasks in metal boxes or frames. Today a mainframe is a computer used by enterprise to perform critical application and is typically synonymous with computers compatible with the IBM System/360

Other systems that can be considered mainframes are Burroughs systems, the UNIVAC 1100/2200 and other IBM computers

Brief history

1500-Leonardo da Vinci designs a mechanical calculator
1880-Herman Hollerith develops a punched-card system to automate the U.S. census. Later his tehnology became IBM
1950-1970-Mainframes start taking over the data processing. IBM and the seven dwarfs:IBM, Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and UNIVAC
1967-First IBM 360/Model 91 shipped to NASA GSFC.
1970-IBM announces a family of machines with an enhanced instruction set, called System/370. The 370s proved so popular that there was a two-year waiting list of customers who had ordered a systems
1985-You had to pay 5 million dollars to get the entry level of 3090 high-end processor of the IBM 308X computer series
1990-Mainframes manufactures start to leave the market and there's basically only one manufacturer of major importance left: IBM
1999-IBM released a new generation of S/390
2002-The IBM S/390 G5/G6 enterprise server family has up to 256 channels, from 2 to 8 Cryptographic Coprocessors, from 8 to 32 Gigabytes of memory, and can run under OS/390, MVS, VM, VSE, or TPF operating systems
2004-The 3/4 ton IBM eServer zSeries 890, dubbed the "Baby Shark" can host up to 32 GBytes of memory
2007-IBM's Blue-Gene is capable of things that human kind couldn't think it's possible. It's capable of one million gigaflops and it has about 300k cores

A full history on mainframes can be found on Viking Waters.com

Usage in various fields and areas

Mainframe's main purpose is to run commercial applications of Fortune 1000 businesses and other large-scale computing processes

Mainly, mainframes are used for bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, ERP.Most important are banking and insurance businesses where enormous amounts of data are processed

Statistics

Early 2006, IBM dominates the mainframes market with a 90% share. Other vendors are:

Unisys with ClearPath mainframes, based on earlier Sperry and Burroughs product lines
Fujitsu's Nova systems, rebranded Unisys ES7000's
Hitachi co-developed the zSeries 800 with IBM to share expenses
Hewlett-Packard sold its unique NonStop systems, which was acquired by Tandem Computers
Groupe Bull's DPS mainframes are available in Europe

Characteristics and features

Programming languages

In the past 85% of the mainframes programs were written in the COBOL programming language Even though Cobol still remains the most widely used language for development in mainframe environment Java and C++ are growing faster. Other programming languages used are PL/I and Assembly language

Mainframe or supercomputer?

Mainframes focus on output/input, reliability and solving mixed workload, as for supercomputers they focus on speed. Both of them execute parallel computing but they expose it differently to the programmer, supercomputers makes it complex, while mainframes just use it to run multiple task When it comes to complicated computations supercomputers are better as they are optimized for that. Mainframes can do more on simple computations and a lot of workload Supercomputer are build for a specific task while mainframes can handle a variety of them

For cryptographic support, I/O handling, monitoring, memory handling, mainframes have ancillary service processors assisting the main processor and so the actual processor is very high. Supercomputers tend not to use service processors

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