• The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
Menu
  • The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • How Far We Have Come

    June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    When the AS/400 turned 29 last week – and yes, I know the stack is called IBM i and I know that it now runs on what IBM calls Cognitive Systems based on Power processors – I happened to be on an airplane coming back from Frankfurt, Germany, after attending the International Supercomputing Conference. As it turns out, the Power9 processor married to Nvidia’s Tesla coprocessors using its “Volta” GPUs was one of the hot topics of conversation, and so was the coherent, shared memory architecture that will lash CPUs and GPUs into a shared memory space of sorts that resembles the single-level storage that has been at the heart of the System/38 and its “Silverlake” AS/400 successor.

    The difference is that the coherence that IBM encoded in its CPF and then OS/400 operating systems made a giant memory space from DRAM main memory and disk drive capacity, which is a neat trick if you think about it since no other platform really ever did this. With the Power9 architecture, IBM is adding coherence between the very high speed but low capacity memory on the GPU accelerators, which have 16 GB of capacity in the Volta generation and a memory bandwidth of 900 GB/sec, about 2.5X that of a Power8 processor and about 10X that of an Intel Xeon processor, and the plain vanilla DRAM on the Power9 main memory controllers. This single level storage will be implemented in Linux, as I learned from conversations with IBM last week, with beta kernel tweaks coming later this year and then rolling out in general availability early next year. I think we can all plan for Power9 announcements in March or April is my guess.

    The neat thing about this coherence is that all of the memory attached to the CPUs and GPUs will be linked together using 25 Gb/sec bi-directional links developed by IBM and Nvidia called NVLink. With the Power9, IBM also has more generic 25 Gb/sec links called Bluelink that we think are the same thing, just using a different protocol. With this architecture, it is like the Power9 chip can have up to three very high-performance math coprocessors attached directly to it in a shared memory cluster, and up to two of these can be chained to make a very powerful compute node.

    This is not at all like the Silverlake processor that was launched in June 1988 and that did not have floating point math and therefore could not do a very good job running even compound interest calculations, much less the math dense kind of work that goes into supercomputing simulations or machine learning training algorithms that the Power9-Volta combo will be the best platform in the world on which to run such code.

    IBM i midrange shops have reason to be proud about how its systems designers and partners have come together to create a viable alternative to Intel’s Xeon processors and even its Xeon Phi parallel X86 processors; the combo will also give Intel’s Nervana neuromorphic and Altera FPGA accelerators a run for the HPC workloads.

    In a sense, the Power9 chip represents a kind of rebirth we have only seen a few times. The System/38 came out in 1979 and shipped the following year in volume, and was followed in 1983 with a simpler System/36 with a flat-file database and lower performance and a lower price tag to expand the base to smaller and midrange customers on a more modest budget. Ahead of the AS/400 launch 29 years ago, IBM had nearly 72,600 System/36 and 11,400 System/38 machines installed in the United States. Based on trends I have seen with the AS/400, the total base was probably 50 percent again as big outside of the US, and add it all up and the System/3X base in early 1988 was about the size of the IBM i system base right now.

    Weird, isn’t it?

    Back then, transaction processing was everything and green screens were fine. Now, every application is crammed with rich media, a slew of languages, and a distributed architecture that makes getting consistent performance a challenge. Back then, we were all younger and computing was without question a lot easier. Think about how sophisticated and ubiquitous computing is now. We have all come a long, long way on this ride, and the Moore’s Law curve has enabled us to make use of many, many orders of magnitude improvements in performance and bang for the buck to still keep this platform relevant.

    It is something to be proud of, and we are. We just hope that IBM doesn’t think of IBM i as an afterthought when it rolls out the Power9 platform either later this year or early next. There is no reason at all that IBM i cannot be modernized to provide smoking, GPU-assisted performance on a shared memory cluster of CPUs and GPUs. Maybe, for once in a long, long time, we can get back to bragging about how OS/400 – well, its progeny anyway – crushes the competition. There is still time to do something more than add a footnote to a Linux cluster announcement aimed at maybe 300 potential customers in the supercomputing and hyperscale worlds and a broader announcement including IBM i shops that is relevant to hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. I have given some ideas about how to do this, and we think you should tell IBM – through us if you want, directly if you don’t – your thoughts on this. We want to have a lot more happy birthdays with this platform.

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Tags: Tags: Cognitive Systems, IBM i, Power9

    Sponsored by
    OCEAN User Group

    OCEAN TechCon25 Online

    It’s an Exciting Time for IBM i !

    July 16 & 17, 2025 – ONLINE

    Two virtual days of learning, presented by an outstanding group of IBM’ers and IBM Champions, featuring leading-edge topics.

    FREE for OCEAN members!

    Register NOW!

    Annual (12-month) Individual OCEAN Memberships are $80 and a Corporate Membership is $250. A Corporate Membership would allow your entire company to have full access to the OCEAN website & video library and to attend OCEAN events at member rates. Act now because rates are increasing on August 1, 2025.

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Seven Bright Spots To Ponder On The AS/400’s 29th Birthday IT Budgets Partly Sunny Thanks To The Cloud

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

TFH Volume: 27 Issue: 43

This Issue Sponsored By

  • Profound Logic Software
  • OCEAN Tech Con 2017
  • COMMON
  • Computer Keyes
  • WorksRight Software

Table of Contents

  • DB2 For i Support Now Offered by Rimini Street
  • Rocketing Ahead With An API Engine
  • Guru: Storing Images In An SQL Table, Part 1
  • IT Budgets Partly Sunny Thanks To The Cloud
  • How Far We Have Come

Content archive

  • The Four Hundred
  • Four Hundred Stuff
  • Four Hundred Guru

Recent Posts

  • With Power11, Power Systems “Go To Eleven”
  • With Subscription Price, IBM i P20 And P30 Tiers Get Bigger Bundles
  • Izzi Buys CNX, Eyes Valence Port To System Z
  • IBM i Shops “Attacking” Security Concerns, Study Shows
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 26
  • Liam Allan Shares What’s Coming Next With Code For IBM i
  • From Stable To Scalable: Visual LANSA 16 Powers IBM i Growth – Launching July 8
  • VS Code Will Be The Heart Of The Modern IBM i Platform
  • The AS/400: A 37-Year-Old Dog That Loves To Learn New Tricks
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 25

Subscribe

To get news from IT Jungle sent to your inbox every week, subscribe to our newsletter.

Pages

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Contributors
  • Four Hundred Monitor
  • IBM i PTF Guide
  • Media Kit
  • Subscribe

Search

Copyright © 2025 IT Jungle