Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer

Re:Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer – Hed... by rbanffy on Sunday April 30, 2023 @08:20AM (#35761891)

Tianhe-1 is a lot of Xeons, Nvidias, and some SPARC-like CPUs. It's not a single image machine with a gigantic shared pool of memory, but a cluster of 7000-ish nodes with very fast interconnects, managed with SLURM. In that sense, these supercomputers are somewhat boring - they are a very large cluster of relatively mundane machines. In that regard, an ARM Mac is more interesting because CPUs and GPUs share memory and you don't need to copy it over a PCIe bus.

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.

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Re:Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer – Hed... by kragen on Sunday April 30, 2023 @06:11PM (#35767053)

this is the same kind of error as saying that an arm mac is somewhat boring because it's a large cluster of relatively mundane logic gates and capacitors

you won't see a mainframe running crysis either

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Re:Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer – Hed... by rbanffy on Monday May 01, 2023 @06:46PM (#35780320)

Apple's M-series, in particular their humongous reorder buffer, is really cool, but IBM's Telum processor with its revolutionary distributed virtual cache architecture and on-chip inference accelerator (with a latency so low it allows AI-fraud detection during transactions) and 5+ GHz base clock, is on a different league, along with all the other little nice things, such as the multiple smaller computers that allow the CPUs to run user code and as little as possible of everything else.

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...

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