A modern mainframe is a thing to behold.
the cerebras wse-2 has 40 gigabytes of on-chip sram, pretty sure tianhe-1 has a few gigabytes of l2 cache, and it's common nowadays for even laptops and cellphones to have weird multi-gigabyte memories as the level in the memory hierarchy below l3 cache or even l2 cache
also, of the machines i listed, only tianhe-1 will have any particular trouble with earthquakes
Cerebras is a tour de force, but it's far from a general purpose computer. What it does, it does well, but you won't see it doing transactional workloads.
you won't see a mainframe running crysis either
They are, of course, built for different uses.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/mainframe-ibm-z16-telum
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16924/did-ibm-just-preview-th...
but there are like 4 or 5 other systems on top of it, some of them use XML, some html, some asp, some java, some vba, some c#.
i dont really understand the concept of a "x language job". like jobs tend to need people to learn systems and domain language, and be problem solvers, and communicators, coordinators, testers, the actual computer language is kind of irrelevant. like i cannot fathom there is a job out there where someone just hacks cobol all day and thats all they do.
Basically, all Cobol I've ever seen is firmly performing a business / functional task. I guess it's in the name :-)
Honestly, I find the whole mainframe world fascinating. Would love to learn more.
I'll always vividly remember this article from the days when I began to become entranced with IT Tech stuff... http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/9712.htm
I was getting into Linux around then too so I devoured Litt's site. Shortly after I read this my cobol-programming neighbor (worked for CapOne) was laid off. As far as I know he never returned to Cobol programming (unless he managed to snag something during covid).