What does the z13 mainframe mean for developers and for business?

1. FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT
Xact Consulting A/S
Arnold Nielsens Boulevard 68A
DK-2650 Hvidovre
+45 7023 0100
info@xact.dk
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Enterprise Modernization
z13: New Opportunities –
if you dare!
Michael Erichsen,
April 2015

2. Lix Level Warning
• This is not a buzzword
compliant sales pitch
• This is low level stuff,
aimed at hard core
programmers

3. Agenda
• New hardware
• New machine
instructions
• Business use
• Development
improvements
• New application types?

4. z12 broadens the Scope of Mainframes
• Processor chip optimized for software performance
– Exploited by Java, compilers, and DB2
– Transactional Execution Facility for parallelism and scale
– Runtime Instrumentation Facility to reduce Java overhead
• zEC12 has the industry’s fastest chip with each core at 5.5 GHz
– z13 processor actually a little bit slower

5. z12 Transactional Execution
• Sequence of instructions
executed as “atomic”
operation
• Eliminates locks
• Improved software
parallel scaling

6. z12 Runtime Instrumentation
• Real-time information
to software on
dynamic program
characteristics
• Increased optimization
in JVM/JIT
recompilations

7. z196/z12 Blade Extension
• Unified Resource
Manager
• Inside the same
security perimeter
• Windows added in z13

8. z13: Big Data, Analytics, Cloud
• Decimal-floating-point packed-conversion facility
• Message-security-assist extension
• Multithreading facility
• Vector facility for z/Architecture (Single Instruction / Multiple
Data (SIMD) technology)

9. Don't forget the Machine Instructions added in earlier Models
• UTF conversion instructions
• Cryptographic instructions
• Gzip acceleration in hardware

10. New Instructions – why?
• Competition from the fast moving distributed world and cheap
commodity hardware
– Java, dot.net, XML, Unicode, BI, Big Data, Analytics, Cloud…
• Basis for compiler improvements: COBOL, PL/I, C, C++, Java,
PHP…
– E.g. decimal floating point format conversions for COBOL
• Also the basis for hybrid applications
– Run traditional and new workloads on the same system

11. Why Java on the Host?
• New developers
• Application portability
• Requires improved interfaces to COBOL,PL/I, C/C++, HLASM
– Language Environment, OO COBOL, DWARF debugging, service
interfaces
• Requires performance improvements and economical tricks
like zIIP and zAAP processors

12. Why XML?
• Standard protocol
• Very extensible
• Broad use
• But terrible performance on all platforms
– Requires processor improvements and zIIP/zAAP processors
• Programming languages use the new hardware and
instructions through XML System Services

13. Why UNICODE?
• All languages, dead or alive
• But is a character 1, 2, 3 or 4
bytes?
– UTF-8, 16, 32 – and 1, 5, 6, 7,
9, and 18…
• COMPARE LOGICAL LONG
UNICODE
• CONVERT UNICODE TO UTF-8
• CONVERT UTF-16 TO UTF-32
• CONVERT UTF-16 TO UTF-8
• MOVE LONG UNICODE
• SEARCH STRING UNICODE

14. Specialized UTF-8

15. Very specialized UTF-8

16. Overspecialized UTF-8

17. New COBOL Instructions
• ULENGTH
• USUBSTR
• UNSUPPLEMENTARY
• VALID
• UWIDTH
• Also supported
natively in DB2 and
MQ

18. Big Data
• Unstructured data
Processable data
• A new paradigm
–Batch
–OLTP
–Grid and Big Data

19. Data Types
• Structured
– Relational, hierarchical, XML
• Unstructured
– Documents, web sites, e-mail, social media
• Streaming
– Sensors, RFID's, Internet of Things, Smart Phone apps, log data

20. Application types
• Search
• Analytics
• Patterns, trends, anomalies
• Traffic control, water and electricity supply, personal health
monitoring, earth quake warnings…
• Sentiment analysis

21. Infrastructure types
– Low latency networking
• Fire-and-forget
– NoSQL (Not only SQL)
• Dynamic, semi-structured data with low latency
– Hadoop
• Processing, storing and analysing data
– UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture)

22. The z Implementation
• Hybrid boxes
• Data accelerators
• Hybrid applications
• Instructions
– Vector processing
– SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data)

24. Vector Facility
• The vector facility provided in the z/Architecture architectural
mode provides fixed-sized vectors ranging from one to sixteen
elements
– For most instructions, all of the data contained in a vector is
operated on by the instructions defined in this facility
– Some instructions only operate on a subset of the elements within a
vector
– If a vector is made up of multiple elements, each element is
processed in parallel with the others
– Instruction completion does not occur until processing of all
elements is complete

25. COBOL Compiler Implementations
• V5.1:
– UTF-8 support improved
– ARCH(10): z12 adds execution-hint facility, load-and-trap facility,
miscellaneous-instructions-extension facility, transactional-execution
facility speeds up each instruction
• V5.2:
– ARCH(11): Exploitation of the z13 instructions helps e.g. INSPECT
TALLYING, INSPECT REPLACING and COMP-3

26. Imagine new application types
(IBM slide)

27. Imagine new application types
(IBM slide)

28. Imagine new application types
(IBM slide)

29. How to keep Costs down doing this?
• System z New Application Licence Charges (zNALC)
– New workload moved from other platforms in separate LPAR
– Value Unit Edition (VUE)
• One time charge for eligible workloads in such LPAR
• Mobile Workload Pricing for z/OS (MWP)
– Extra load must be documented
• IFL, zIIP, zAAP, and Blade Extension