Tag Archives: mainframe

IBM’s new mainframe keeps everything encrypted, all the time

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Data breaches are bad enough by themselves, but they're made worse when companies don't bother to (or can't) encrypt all their info. It's tantamount to giving hackers the keys to the kingdom. But what to do? IBM thinks it has a simple solution: encry...

Harwell Dekatron revived as the world’s oldest working, original digital computer

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Harwell Dekatron gets a reboot, becomes the world's oldest working, original digital computer

Over 60 years since the first digital computers switched on, the chances of seeing one of these pioneers in action have grown incredibly slim as time (and recycling) takes its toll. Take a visit to Britain's National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park as of today, however, and you'll see one working. A finished 3-year restoration effort lets the Harwell Dekatron -- at one point renamed the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation from Harwell, or WITCH -- claim the title of the world's oldest functional digital computer still using its original design. Aside from its room-filling dimensions, the 1951-era mainframe may be worth the trip just for recalling a time when there were no hard and fast rules in computing: the Dekatron operates in its namesake decimal system, not binary, and puts most of its components on full display. The computer is part of the regular exhibit lineup and should be easy to see; the daunting part may be realizing that virtually any chip in a 2012 smartphone could outmuscle the Dekatron without breaking a sweat.

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Source: National Museum of Computing

IBM debuts new mainframe computer as it eyes a more mobile Watson

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IBM debuts new mainframe computers as it eyes a more mobile Watson

Those looking for a juxtaposition of IBM's past and future needn't look much further than two bits of news out of the company this week. The first comes with IBM's announcement of its new zEnterprise EC12 25 mainframe server -- a class of computer that may be a thing of the past in some places, but which still serves a fairly broad range of companies. In addition to an appearance that lives up to the "mainframe" moniker, this one promises 25 percent more performance per core than its predecessor and 50 percent more capacity. The second bit of news involves Watson, the company's AI effort that rose to fame on Jeopardy! and has since gone on to find a number of new roles. As Bloomberg reports, one of its next steps may be to take on Siri in the smartphone space. While there's no indication of a broader consumer product, IBM sees a range of possible applications for a mobile Watson in business and enterprise -- even, for instance, giving farmers the ability to ask when they should plant their crops. Before that happens, though, IBM says it needs to give Watson more "senses" in order to respond to real-world input like image recognition -- not to mention learn all it can about any given subject.

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IBM debuts new mainframe computer as it eyes a more mobile Watson originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 12:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceBloomberg, IBM  | Email this | Comments

IBM pushing System z, Power7+ chips as high as 5.5GHz, mainframes get mightier

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IBM pushing System z, Power7 chips as high as 55GHz, mainframes get mightier

Ten-core, 2.4GHz Xeons? Pshaw. IBM is used to the kind of clock speeds and brute force power that lead to Europe-dominating supercomputers. Big Blue has no intentions of letting its guard down when it unveils its next generation processors at the upcoming Hot Chips conference: the company is teasing that the "zNext" chip at the heart of a future System z mainframe will ramp up to 5.5GHz -- that's faster than the still-speedy 5.2GHz z196 that has led IBM's pack since 2010. For those who don't need quite that big a sledgehammer, the technology veteran is hinting that its upcoming Power7+ processors will be up to 20 percent faster than the long-serving Power7, whose current 4.14GHz peak clock rate may seem quaint. We'll know just how much those extra cycles mean when IBM takes to the conference podium on August 29th, but it's safe to say that our databases and large-scale simulations won't know what hit them.

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IBM pushing System z, Power7+ chips as high as 5.5GHz, mainframes get mightier originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Aug 2012 02:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceWall Street Journal, Hot Chips  | Email this | Comments