CPU Archives - IT Jungle

IBM Raises The Curtain A Little On Future Power Processors

November 13, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We commented back in August when the Hot Chips 2024 conference was underway at Stanford University that it was odd that IBM did reveal some of the speeds and feeds of the Power11 processor that we all know is coming in 2025. And when the TechXchange 2024 partner event was held in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, we were pretty sure that IBM was working on some sort of accelerated system for GenAI applications and a week later we remembered that the obvious pairing was a Power System host with scads of IBM’s own “Spyre” AI accelerators running …
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DRV Brings More Automation to IBM i Message Monitoring

June 22, 2022 Alex Woodie

Automation is the name of the game in IT today, particularly with the talent shortage gripping the industry and remote work becoming the norm. To that end, a new release of a message management solution from DRV Technologies that will enable IBM i shops to automate their responses to IBM i messages will likely be well received.

DRV Technologies develops a series of handy utilities for the IBM i server, including spool management and distribution (SpoolFlex), a forms management tool (FormFlex), secure MICR check printing (SecureChex), a database query and report writing tool (DBXFlex), and MessageFlex, a message monitoring solution. …
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Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 2 – Dealing With CPU Queuing Wait Time

March 21, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

When we drive our cars, we hope to avoid red lights and traffic jams, because we all hate waiting immobile in traffic. I’m sure that you are aware, fully or subtly, that active jobs in any computer system can encounter wait as well. The IBM i developer team has categorized many types of wait.

In this article, let’s look at CPU Queuing wait time. Let’s see how we can interpret and address it in a sensible way to resolve poor performance. I’ll try to provide you with a useful approach to wait time analysis using a gloriously useful performance reporting …
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Guru: Understanding Database Performance Using The Performance Data Investigator, Part 1

June 21, 2021 Dawn May

This is a two-part series on how to use the Performance Data Investigator (PDI) for investigating performance of Db2 for i. While the SQL Performance Center in Access Client Solutions is the tool of choice for Db2 performance analysis, there is valuable information that you can get from using PDI. PDI is often a useful starting point to help guide you in the correct direction when trying to identify performance issues. In my experience, PDI is under-utilized for Db2 investigation. For those not familiar with PDI, you may want to read the article, Getting Started with the Performance Data Investigator …
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The Ultimate Set Of Tools

December 14, 2020 Rob McNelly

Those of a certain age will certainly remember the moment in Fast Times At Ridgemont High when Jeff Spicoli got himself into a bind after he wrecked his friend’s car. Luckily, Spicoli’s dad was a TV repairman, and he had an ultimate set of tools. Spicoli knew that with those tools, he could fix it. That level of confidence is intoxicating, although in this case it was possibly misplaced.

I have a friend that lives around the corner from me that actually does have the ultimate set of tools, and knows how to use them. For example, he recently rebuilt …
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Nagios Solidifies Role in IBM i Monitoring

December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that are looking for monitoring solutions would do well to add Nagios to their short list. The open source software has been embraced by IBM i shops, and thanks to a new SQL connector added by IBM with the latest technology refreshes and plans for monitoring the HMC, Nagios connectivity to IBM i is on the upswing.

Nagios Core is a free, open source software project that’s been adopted by thousands of customers around the world to monitor servers, storage, software, services, networking gear, and anything else that can be connected to the network. The software is …
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Fifty Years Of Operating IBM Systems

March 11, 2019 Bill Hansen

The world is celebrating some important 50th anniversaries this year. My interests in aerospace and music led me to recall four events from 1969. The most famous event was the first manned moon landing in July, which occurred the same week that I turned 21. Two months before that was the first flight of the Concorde supersonic transport. I mark the beginning of the “summer of love” with the Woodstock concert, and its end with the tragic concert at Altamont Speedway. (Who knew that Hell’s Angels would not make great security guards?)

For me, all of this pales in comparison …
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Advice For The IBM i Shop Buying X86 Servers

October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred talking about the Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform, but it we also keep a keen eye on what is going on in the rest of the IT world, particularly when it comes to alternative server hardware and transaction processing and data analytics platforms. There are many, many ways to skin the cats that are the backbone of the business.

Ok, so that was a bad metaphor. It happens. Like a line of bad code.

Anyway, it is not lost on us that somewhere around 95 percent of …
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IBM Adds Mainstream Flash Drives To Power Systems

August 22, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We tend to be focused on compute in the IT industry, and the CPUs get a lot of the glory. But the fastest CPU in the world doesn’t amount to anything without peripherals to keep it fed. That is why, of course, that the main frame was called that, after all. There were plenty of other frames surrounding it, making it into a system.

This holds as true for the Power Systems machines as much as any other machine, and whether or not they are running IBM i, too. The good news is that IBM does a fairly good …
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Power Systems And The Spectre And Meltdown Threats

January 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Speculative execution is something that has been part of modern processors for well over a decade, and while it is hard to quantify how much of a performance benefit this collection of techniques have delivered, it is obviously significant enough that all CPUs, including IBM Power and System z chips, have them. And that, as the new Spectre and Meltdown security holes that were announced by Google on January 3 show, turns out to be a big problem.

Without getting too deep into the technical details, there are many different ways to implement speculative execution, which is used to …
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