Skip to main content

End of an era: NASA shuts down its last mainframe



There was a time when IBM's mainframes were cutting-edge machines for scientific and engineering calculations.
Those days began in the 1960s, when IBM's System 360 rewrote the rules of computing and before humans walked on the moon. Big Blue long since has moved its high-performance technical computing effort toward its high-end Blue Gene systems and more conventional Linux servers using Intel and AMD x86 chips and Unix servers with its own Power processor. IBM's System Z mainframe line is now geared for commercial customers who are willing to pay a premium for reliability and high performance for tasks such as database transactions.
Now NASA has followed suit, switching off its last mainframe, Chief Information OfficerLinda Cureton said in a blog post Saturday.
"This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing. Marshall Space Flight Center powered down NASA's last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe," Cureton said.
For many in the industry, mainframes have become so burdened with a reputation for a bygone age of computing that they became synonymous with dinosaurs. IBM fought back, boosting performance, adding new technology, and even naming the systems after dinosaurs -- T-Rex, Raptor -- and the systems remain a fixture in some corners of the industy.
Cureton, who once programmed a System 360 mainframe in assembly language at the Goddard Space Flight Center, came to their defense:
They're really not so bad honestly, and they have their place. Things like virtual machines, hypervisors, thin clients, and swapping are all old hat to the mainframe generation though they are new to the current generation of cyber youths...
Today, they are the size of a refrigerator but in the old days, they were the size of a Cape Cod. Even though NASA has shut down its last one, there is still a requirement for mainframe capability in many other organizations.
More than four decades ago, when NASA acquired two "super-speed" System 360 Model 95 machines in 1968, IBM touted the machines' mathematical abilities.
"Both of NASA's Model 95s are handling space exploration problems which require unusually high computation speeds," IBM said. "The Model 95s are capable of computing 14-digit multiplications at a rate of over 330 million in a minute."
The IBM system also had a staggeringly large amount of memory -- 4MB of main memory supplemented by 1MB of "ultra-high-speed thin-film memories."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

10 URLs to Find Out What Google Knows About You

Google is much more than just a search giant. It is also home to many of your favorite products: Gmail, YouTube, and Chrome, just to name a few. Apart from that, it also offers many products to help you  keep track of your data . Most of these are  hidden deep  inside the My Account dashboard, which many users don’t really know of. These hidden tools  may reveal interesting details  about your usage of Google’s many services. We’ve compiled a list of important Google URLs of some  hidden tools  that carry information of what you did with Google, mostly from the searches that you have made on their many products, the voice searches and typed out Google searches that you have made. Are you ready to  find out what how Google knows about you ? 1.  Google Dashboard Google Dashboard offers  transparency and control over the personal data stored with your Google Account. You can  view  and  manage the data gener...

Edible water balloons that could get rid of the need for plastic bottles

In case you didn’t know, bottled water is destroying the planet. We know that we need to be drinking plenty of water. It’s important. But the plastic bottles they’re sold in are terrible for the environment. One solution is using reusable bottles that you can fill from any nearby taps instead of buying a new bottle each time. Another solution is much more exciting. A group of engineers from Skipping Rocks Lab have developed a wonderful thing called The Ooho!. It’s a globe filled water that you can pop in your mouth whole. The outer shell is made of algae, so it’s edible and biodegradable. Meaning there’s no need for packaging or plastic – the globes of water are self-contained and ready to consume. Exciting, right? Plus they’re wobbly and they look cool, which is always a bonus. The team have now created a crowdfunding page to make their creation available to the public, with goals of selling The Ooho! at festival and marathons within the next 12 m...

New "Super-Earth" discovered only 22 light years away

An international team of scientists led by Professors Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler from the Carnegie Institution for Science in the U.S. has discovered a potentially habitable Super-Earth that's "just" 22 light years away. The new Super-Earth has a mass that is 4.5 times larger than that of our planet and it revolves around its parent star in 28 days - a star that is significantly smaller than ours. This remarkable new discovery suggests that habitable planets could exist in a wider variety of environments than previously believed. Of the 750-odd  exoplanets  (extrasolar planets) discovered so far only very few can be considered " Super-Earths ." This newly discovered example called GJ667Cc is rocky like Earth and is rich in heavy chemical elements such as iron, carbon and silicon. Positioned at a distance from Earth of 22 light years, corresponding to a bit over 129 trillion miles (209 trillion km), the planet can be considered to be on Earth...