Vindicator
A while back I posted that we had received an exciting delivery in our London datacentre - our LinuxOne test system from IBM. This post was light on details because of course, our LinuxOne (named "Vindicator") was a little special - it was the one of the first (I am told actually the first but in the Christmas rush I want to be safe!) of the new IBM LinuxOne Express 4s ever shipped to a customer. The actual system was announced yesterday and so I can say a little bit more about what we got.
For readers from an HPC background, it might be a bit unclear what a LinuxOne is. We are very familiar with IBM's POWER based systems from the early 2000s when it made up a significant chunk of the HPC systems worldwide (indeed my first "Tier 1" experience was "HPCx", the UK's national supercomputer resource at the time which was a massive cluster made of IBM pSeries running AIX) and Summit, presently number 7 on the Top 500 is an IBM POWER9 system. So when I mention this system to HPC people, I am asked - is this a POWER system?
It's not.
It's much cooler than that.
The IBM LinuxOne is IBM's "cut down" SKU of the IBM Z mainframes - an architecture that stretches its linage all the way back to System/360, through System/370 and System/390 to today's hyper-modern and secure IBM Z - which is entirely designed to run Linux. You can run the same Linux (the s390x arch) on IBM Z, but you can't run z/OS on the LinuxOne. It's supported by RedHat (of course) and by Canonical, as well as other Linux distros.
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We have an R&D budget and I've wanted to do a Linux on Mainframe project for a while, for a number of interconnected reasons:
Last year, IBM announced the rackmount version of the LinuxOne Rockhopper (our London datacentre is pre-racked - another challenge of buying a mainframe!) and we stepped up our efforts to acquire one for testing, working with our partners Logicalis to procure such a system for our R&D programme. It transpired that our timing and budget made the Express 4 a perfect match and as a result we have procured Vindicator, along with an IBM flash storage system to attach to it.
Initially, the system will be used for three projects based around the above points - investigating performance (both "raw performance" and "throughput per watt") for Next Generation Sequencing workloads, how easy it is to integrate the use of the hardware security features into our "new" Linux + Kubernetes based stack, and then some work on the AI performance of the Telum processor to see how much inference we could do in a LinuxOne TRE. After that however, we are keen to work with colleagues around UCL and in the wider university community on projects of interest to you!
This is one of the more personally exciting projects I have gotten to do since we became ARC and we look forward to working with IBM and Logicalis on this.
Congratulations on pioneering with "Vindicator"! As Steve Jobs once said - Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. Your trailblazing journey with LinuxOne Express 4s truly exemplifies leading the way in tech innovation. ??? Keep inspiring!
Connecting Talent with Opportunity
12 个月Congratulations on pioneering with the IBM LinuxOne Express 4, that's incredibly exciting! ?? Henry Ford once said, "Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, working together is success." Embracing innovation, like you've done, paves the way for tremendous success. ?? Additionally, might your team be interested in a unique partnership opportunity? We're sponsoring the Guinness World Record for Tree Planting, aiming to blend technology and sustainability. Check it out [here](https://bit.ly/TreeGuinnessWorldRecord). Let's innovate for a greener future together! ???
DataOps | MLOps | DevOps | ITOps
1 年NDA maintained.
Non Executive Director
1 年Awesome bit of kit that benefits from both the hardware and some of the availability software the mainframe is famous for (as a mainframe customer when the last ‘rebooted’ their machine and that will frown and look puzzled!) If you are exploring new workloads for this then I have long held an (unfashionable) view that the I/O capabilities of these would suite them well to telco workloads and as these are becoming containerised there could be a great opportunity for the platform.
Be very interested to see how you get on with this. ??