• IBM Scores $325 Million Power Supercomputing Deals With DOE

  November 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Power Systems ecosystem just got a huge shot in the arm now that IBM has landed a $325 million contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to build two new massive supercomputers, the largest of which, called “Summit,” could scale to as much as 300 petaflops of aggregate number-crunching performance. The Summit system will be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home to Titan, one of the largest supercomputers in the U.S. and indeed one of the most powerful machines in the world. The Sierra system will go into Lawrence Livermore National Lab, where IBM sold its first prototype

  … Read more

• Time To Update Power Systems Site, Sales Pitch

  November 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM has spent billions of dollars and many years to bring the Power8 systems to market, and as we all know, it is not quite done rolling Power8 gear into the field. The company is also not quite caught up on updating its Power Systems website to reflect its new machines and its new focus on competing against X86 iron for transaction processing, analytics, and technical computing workloads. This is a problem, and one that a $100 billion IT giant should not have. If you go to the Power Systems sub-site on the IBM website, and then go to the

  … Read more

• Do ‘Non-Standard’ OSes Like IBM i Pose Security Risks?

  November 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  As an IBM i professional, you’re familiar with the platform and comfortable working around it. But you’re also aware that the IBM i is different from other systems, and that it makes some people uncomfortable. According to new report from the SANS Institute, the mere existence of “non-standard” operating systems such as IBM i has the potential to introduce a security risk in the data center. In its October paper Data Center Server Security Survey 2014, the SANS Institute attempted to learn how organizations are implementing security in the data center, to define some best practices, and to

  … Read more

• As I See It: In Search of Digital Wisdom

  November 17, 2014 Victor Rozek

  Logic suggests that natives always precede immigrants; and history records that the succession process frequently doesn’t work out well for the natives. At least until now. Technology, it seems, has turned succession on its head. According to Mark Prensky, when it comes to adapting to technology, not only did the immigrants precede the natives, but the natives are doing better than their precursors. In 2001, Prensky, an educator by trade and a futurist by inclination, published an article introducing the concepts of “Digital Immigrants” and “Digital Natives.” In his model, the immigrants are the elders among us who remember a

  … Read more

• If Infrastructure Matters, What About i?

  November 17, 2014 Dan Burger

  The Institute of Business Value, which is sponsored by IBM, has been turning out reports on its IT infrastructure research. Earlier this year in a report titled, The IT Infrastructure Conversation, it revealed less than 10 percent of organizations surveyed believed their existing IT infrastructure is prepared to meet the demands of mobile technology, big data, cloud computing, and social media. That doesn’t bode well for IBM’s plans to lead down those roads. But on the other hand, it presents an opportunity to sell a lot of infrastructure, particularly infrastructure that is enterprise strength and up to

  … Read more

• Negotiating The Upgrade Paths To Power8 Enterprise Systems

  November 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This week, IBM will start shipping the first of its line of high-end Power E870 and Power E880 machines. These are the largest NUMA-style shared memory machines that Big Blue has designed using its Power8 processors, and they replace the existing Power 770, Power 780, and Power 795 machines in the lineup. Eventually, a full-bore, 12-core Power8 chip will be available in the top end Power E880 machines, offering significantly more performance in 16 sockets than a Power 795 could deliver in 32 sockets. To recap: IBM intends to offer a Power E880 that scales to 128 cores using an

  … Read more

• The Windows Of Opportunity

  November 17, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long, long time since the AS/400 was the dominant, and some cases the sole, platform in use at most IBM midrange shops. As we all know, the client/server revolution took the data center by storm in the late 1980s and early 1990s, first on the desktop with the PC being used as a kind of intelligent monitor for back office systems and then later with the popularity of NetWare, Unix, and eventually Windows on servers, in the data center itself as adjunct coprocessors for systems like the AS/400. Because Windows was familiar and then ubiquitous on

  … Read more

• Flip This Job Number: Adjusting The Job Queue Control Utility For Job Number Resets

  November 12, 2014 Hey, Joe

  I just read your article on creating a skeleton program for controlling IBM i job queues creating a skeleton program for controlling IBM i job queues. In your job queue physical file (WRKJOBQPF) that contains the list of jobs inside a specific job queue, you keyed that file by the six-digit job number of each job in queue. I think that’s a bad idea. Here’s why. . . –Charles Charles continues: “On busy systems where the job number can flip (over to 000001) daily, it introduces a period of time where the results will not be desirable. Needless to

  … Read more

• SQL Functions You Didn’t Know You Had, Part 2

  November 12, 2014 Ted Holt

  In SQL Functions You Didn’t Know You Had, Part 1, I showed you how to make an SQL function that runs a subprocedure in a service program. What I showed you is fine up to a point, but it’s not the entire story. The technique that I shared with you breaks down when null values enter the picture. First, the subprocedures in the ADDR service program cannot accept null arguments into parameters. Second, those subprocedures cannot return a null value to the SQL query. These behaviors are specified in two clauses of the CREATE FUNCTION statement: PARAMETER STYLE GENERAL

  … Read more

• TR8 DB2 For i Enhancements, Part 1

  November 12, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  IBM i 7.1 Technology refresh 8 was released on June 6, 2014, and it has another group of small database enhancements worth reviewing. IBM i 7.2 users will find that they already have these features. This tip assumes that you have IBM i 7.2 or IBM i 7.1 with Database Group PTF Level 29 or higher installed. QSYS2.GENERATE_SQL Stored Procedure This is one sweet new stored procedure IBM has given us. Its purpose is to programmatically retrieve SQL source code into a source member. This procedure can accept a boatload of parameters as shown below. Many of the parameters control

  … Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles