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by xirbeosbwo1234
1932 days ago
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I certainly question the orthodox view that software should be fault-tolerant and horizontally-scalable. If programmer time is more valuable than machine time, then why can't my team get a single server with a few TiB of RAM and a few hundred cores and forget all the gnarly problems of distributed computing? Why do we accept that our hardware is unrelaible and then spend so much effort making our software tolerate failure? I do not know whether or not mainframes are the right solution, though. I don't really know anything about them. I don't know whether or not the architecture is the correct approach. >IBM has grown usage as measured by MIPS, a method of calculating the raw speed used, by 350% over the past ten years. That's an awful metric. MIPS isn't even a good way of measuring aggregate performance and aggregate performance is a terrible way of measuring adoption. |
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This is probably not true in industries such as banking, manufacturing, agriculture, etc. I worked as a field engineer in a food processing plant once, during the peak season for the crop being processed. The plant manager told me that downtime could cost the plant up to a quarter million USD per day.
> Why do we accept that our hardware is unrelaible and then spend so much effort making our software tolerate failure?
From what I understand, the whole point of mainframe design is to tackle the issue that hardware is unreliable. Mainframes feature many hardware redundancies, moreso than a commodity rack server.
> I do not know whether or not mainframes are the right solution, though. I don't really know anything about them. I don't know whether or not the architecture is the correct approach.
Mainframes are designed for throughput, not performance. They are good at things like transaction processing, not machine learning.