Why is zSeries so CPU poor
McKown, John
ey, Barb! Sorry I'm so long between postings. The big heat wave finally hit Michigan for a...
it was '79? or '81? asilomar acm sigops conference (i've lost my proceedings over the years and don't have ready reference) .... the 432 guys gave a talk. i remember them mentioning was that a lot of multiprocessor operation was hidden by the hardware ... you past process units to the "hardware" ... and it kept track of how many processors there were and which processes ran on which processors. it was interesting since i had done something similar for m'code '75 for VAMPs ... a 5-way 370 smp project. ... misc. past postings mentioning VAMPs project:
today it would be considered slightly analogous to what happens with LPARs.
The other thing they mentioned in the sigops talk was that all this high -level function was dropped directly into 432 silicon ... and there was no way of patching it ... short of shipping brand new silicon. That characteristic was enuf to doom 432. i've got 3 old 432 intel books that didn't
It was true of a fair bit of software for the IBM PC, too, and led to an entertaining arms race. Early on I recall using...
the above post lists the following i432 books (in my basement) ... along with quote from one of the intros mentioning b5000 from the 60s and also referencing s-38
The bear trade really got the accidental-rest insurance business off the ground, for example. There's an...
Introduction to the iAPX 432 Architecture (171821-001) copyright 1981, Intel iAPX 432 Object Primer (171858-001, Rev. B) iAPX 432 Interface Processor Architecture Reference Manual (171863-001)
....
there have been some number of other past discussions comparing 432 and s-38 (aka as-400 precursor) ... as well as s-38 embodying several "FS" features
attached from long ago and far away (talking about vamps smp work from 1975). i had done dynamic adaptive resource management for cp67 as an undergraduate in the 60s and then rereleased the "resource manager" for vm370 on 11may76.
To: lovelovex
re: vamps;
I did all the design work & innovation for both the machine architecture & operating system that made the number of real processors relatively transparent
Dispatching & interruption was completely in the microcode (below the machine interface). Essentially the number of processors were therefor below the interface ... my feedback algorithms had to be beefed up to allow for dynamically calculating the amount of CPU resources that were currently available for consumption.
Turns out all the verbage in the Intel 432 document about number of processors in a complex is transparent to the SCP. It can be transparent from the standpoint of the dispatcher ... but the overall resource allocation algorithms have to have a pretty good idea of the amount of CPU resource available in the complex for doing a accurate job.
... snip ...
misc. past posts mentioning 432 transition transition iAPX432? Parity - why even or odd) boring, wandering story programming for small clusters identical cores? identical cores?
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