Re: mainframe career advice

Mike <MPBrede@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> >
> > Using standard software a single PC can typeset about thousend pages
> > per second. A PC database can easily deliver 20 thousend rows per
> > second. So, a single PC can generate content for millions of checks
> > per hour. It looks that the bottleneck is actual printing: you need
> > a sizeable printer farm to handle that load.
> >
> > Granted, mainframes have bigger IO capacity that desktop PC. But you
> > just have to size things correctly, if not desktop then server machines.
> > For highest load it looks that IBM Power serwers are the best -- from
> > data sheets it looks that top Power machines offer 2-10 times better
> > performance (depending of the load) then top Z architecture machines.
> >
>
> Could you cite some sources for your numbers? I find them to be rather
> on the high end.
>

For typesetting on PC I just use a pipline:

flat file -> Perl Script -> TeX -> dvips

and just measured the speed. For database speed I forgot the
location of benchmark page.

Info on z9-109 from (but since data is incomplete I guesstimate
based on earlier models):

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/systems/systemz9/z9109

Info on p5 595:

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hardware/highend/595.html


z9-109 page does not disclose clock speed but following:

http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/z990/

I see that z990 uses 1.2 GHz (0.83 ns) clock. Considering that clock
speeds were changing slowly in recent two years I guess that z9-109
has much slower clock then 1.9 GHz in p5 595. Also I guess that p5 595
(like the lower end models) is highly superscalar (3-5 instructions per
clock) while Z architecture is probably doing 1-2 instructions per clock
(it used to be single dispatch and comparisons of models suggest that it
still may be the case). p5 595 has 64 processors, top z9-109 has 38
(with 54 scheduled for November). So p5 595 seem to have much higher
instruction rate than z9-109. Memory and IO capacity of p5 595 seem
to be high enough to keep ahead also on data intensive load.


--
Waldek Hebisch
hebisch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.