Single System Image questions 540

homework question, right?

the hone system provided dataprocessing support for world-wide sales, marketing, and field personnel. in the late 70s, the US hone datacenters were consolidated in california. circa 1980, the US hone complex was pushing 40k user defintions.

the typical HONE environment was complex set of cms-apl applications that migrated to apl-cms ... which were frequently very processor intensive. basically the us hone complex were the largest mainframe SMP of the period with max. number configured in a cluster with common disk farm.

with the consolidation of all the us hone datacenters, the "dump" 3270 terminals were connected to frontend terminal concentrators which were interconnected to the backend HONE processor cluster. prior to the datacenter consolidation ... specific field connections went to a specific datacenter machine. with all the datacenters consolidated at a single lcoation with interconnected common disk farm ... it offered the opportunity of implementing single-system-image with load-balancing and fall-over-availability support.

the hone system had started out as a clone of the science center's cp67-cms system

i was done a lot of performance optimization work ... but there was also a couple projects at the science center doing performance modeling work. one was a sophisticated performance model implemented in cms-apl. some amount of this work provided basis for the original morphing of performance management into things like capacity planning.

the apl performance model was also used as a basis for controlling a large sophisticated set of automated (2000 that took 3months elapsed time to run) benchmarks

as part of calibrating the resource manager in preparation for release.

the same apl performance model was also used for a HONE application called the "performance predictor" that customer sales people could run "what-if" questions about effects of change in customer hardware configuration or workload (i.e. in this period APL was used for a lot of applications that are currently implemented with spreadsheets)

the APL performance model was also used as an application that ran on every processor complex in the cluster and provided information to the front-end terminal concentrators on which processor to route login requests ... aka SSI load-balancing. The application was also aware of offline machines and-or machines about to become offline ... so it would avoid routing login requests to those processors in the cluster.

In the early 80s, the northern cal. HOME consolidated complex was replicated, first in Dallas and then again in Boulder ... handling load-balancing ... but also availability (some worry about earthquake disaster hitting the cal. datacenter.)

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