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What to run on mainframes?

acorn_1401

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Excluding legacy systems old systems for years and will do for the lifetime of the buildings (nuclear power plants etc)

Nothing these days is done quickly on a large old unit so….
What “programs” are actually run on mainframes?

What should museums spent their big iron times running?
 
if stockfish (chess program) was run on an older ibm could it beat deep blue at chess?

Could an ibm 360 “learn” how to play breakout faster than the time due to modern understanding of something?

is along the lines of where I was going with this.
 
-Inventory management and allocation
-Out-of-Stock and stock replenishment predictions
-Best-Lean order predictions
-Customer account services
-Purchase transaction processing (point of sale)
-Purchase transaction processing (linked Debit/credit transaction services)
-Payroll control
-Vendor accounting
-Branch job prediction
-Nightly inventory reporting
-Nightly job reporting
Etc.

Mainframes are only useful for very high I/O-intensive tasks and managing very large datasets. Playing chess on a mainframe is very wasteful per-cycle as mainframes (especially older systems like the 360) are more efficient in batch or timeshare. Playing chess while using branch prediction so it can play out multiple moves at once by predicting the next half dozen to a dozen plays is a lot more efficient.
 
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Well given "modern mainframe" means IBM Z and whilst they only occupy a couple of racks the power and tech involved is impressive, powerful and expensive.
So its generally reserved for high volume time critical applications such as banking/finance/stock trading and airline reservations.
I think its worth reading up on the latest "Z" boxes....



In the UK many government systems run on mainframe software running under emulation (ICL2900/VME). I found one press release from ICL.

https://www.fujitsu.com/emeia/about...0305-fujitsu-invests-in-extension-of-vme.html

and a friend was asked to remain at Fujitsu to help with work at the DVLA (driving an vehicle licencing) center.

.... historically I have played Snake on an IBM 3270 screen. The channel lets it run at reasonable speed, but slows every one else
 
Well, the push toward miniaturization made the difference. Every computer engineer was aware of the nanosecond-foot problem. Even in that CDC 6600 super, running at a blistering 10MHz, there were several clocks spread around the thing, with synchronizing circuitry. An numerous wires on the backplane that were tuned for length.
A clock of, say, 3GHz would have been viewed as impractical at best.

Modern supers are lots of little fast processors. Sort of akin to taking 9 women to get a baby in one month...
 
Take it from the big users like Lawrence Livermore or Sandia--bomb simulations. :)
Weather forecasting will always be a big consumer of computation.

How about bitcoin mining? :)
Heh. CDC 1604 s/n 0001 was used by the navy for weather prediction and charting at the postgrad school.
 
Yeah, the brass at the PG school (I almost took a job as site analyst there--thought better of life on the beach and drinking at the Hog's Breath Saloon) were pretty tight with Bill Norris to the extent that they expected to have a system on the loading dock the day after it was announced.
 
I have an AS/400 820 system with a big FC/5035 migration cabinet. Used equipment purchased from a polytechnic university. It cames with a websphere MQ license, so I used it to develop a business application for a tea restaurant owned by my sister.It works very well, but the air conditioning system costs a lot of electricity.
 
Excluding legacy systems old systems for years and will do for the lifetime of the buildings (nuclear power plants etc)

Nothing these days is done quickly on a large old unit so….
What “programs” are actually run on mainframes?

What should museums spent their big iron times running?

CADAM and Dassault's CATIA .
 
Excluding legacy systems old systems for years and will do for the lifetime of the buildings (nuclear power plants etc)

Nothing these days is done quickly on a large old unit so….
What “programs” are actually run on mainframes?
At Hess's Department Stores, Allentown, PA our NCR mainframe was occupied with retail applications. Databases could only have 4 character desegnations. So the SKU database was SKUM ( for SKU Master ) and SKUD ( for SKU Detail ). There was much SKUM and SKUD happening. Entire conversations could be had with imponderable initiallisms and acronyms like "STRAPS feeding SKUD updating CRAP with SKUM" and worse. It was a wonderful time to be alive.
 
Chuck(G) is on to something with the high-energy physics applications. SLAC was a blue shop in the 1970s and 1980s, they went so far as to build systems (168/E, 3081/E) out of AMD 2900 bit-slice that could run computational codes written in 360 FORTRAN and then (after compilation with the IBM FORTRAN compiler) run through a translator and loader, both to move workload from the big blue iron and for use in real-time processors connected to the experiment.
 
Also weather forecasting. I recall working on a proposal back in the 1970s for ECMWF. Our contact said "That's wonderful--do you have something about 100 times faster?".
 
What should museums spent their big iron times running?

As has been pointed out farther up in the thread, classic mainframe legacy applications run businesses or the government and are not particularly
interesting to run in a museum context at all.

Imagine sitting in front of a 3270 doing DMV license plate / drivers license processing.

yawn...


"but, but, but, what about my gamez??? that's all I really care about"

sorry kid, wrong world.

There is also the little problem that very little mainframe software still exists that isn't encumbered by expensive licenses.

The situation with commercial supercomputers is even worse.
SGI, for example, had a scorched earth policy for Cray's software, and they destroyed everything before
selling what was left of Cray off.
 
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This is a poorly thought idea, but why not use AI (I told you this was poorly thought out) to generate irrelevant datasets and transaction information to exercise the machine. You want to watch the magic of a computer capable of processing 15000 financial transactions in a minute, sure lets just build thousands of random customers and accounts and have it bounce fictional money between eachother.

The 1402 exhibit at the CHM does nearly all the things you expect an older computer to do. Makes chattery noises, spins tapes, prints forms, reads cards and breaks down constantly, yet the only input you feed it is your name.
 
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The 1402 exhibit at the CHM does nearly all the things you expect an older computer to do.
Without all that messy stuff, like having the 7090 generating the data that you'd put on a tape for the 1401 to print out.

Whirl, whirl, blink blink, print print.
 
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Without all that messy stuff, like having the 7090 generating the data that you'd put on a tape for the 1401 to print out.

Whirl, whirl, blink blink, print print.
All true Al, but some of them could be coaxed into turning out excellent Snoopy and Marilyn Monroe calendars.
 
You could look at APL or REXX programming languages; both are interactive to some degree. You could implement an index or KWIC search of say, Shakespeare's plays. Where is the word "durst" used for instance?
 
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