On Saturday 27 April 2002 16:28, you wrote:
> > Today that campus worth of hardware is emulated in the hercules
> > s360/370/390/ zSeries emulator http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules
> > running on a PC running linux or winbloZ
> >
> > OS, DOS, MVS, VM ... running on your pc, serves x3270
> > terms over the network etc etc.
>
> Ow! You're killing me!
Actually, its sort of unexpected that you havent been
pointed to this project or found this on your own.
Its certainly a less cost option than a P370/390 card
These guys for example have a turnkey cdrom image
where you can go from the cd burner to a TSO
login in only a few minutes.
A real box can total flood a bundle of gigabit fiber
the diameter of your right leg, its the I/O that sets
these monsters apart really, their CPUs are no
slouch, but not any faster than a common modern
PC chip.
Course there is their memory scrubing, the ability
to hotspare memory modules on the fly, redundancy
that can even deal with failed cache and buss lines.
After reading about all the bother they go to to make
these things survive failures and glitches, it brings to
mind a senario where you wonder how many .45 cal
pistol slugs the machine could absorb before the
failure handler could no longer cope.
There is a paper that explains the systems and
schemes that go into the machines hardware fault
tolerance that would leave the first time readers jaw
agape, but i cant dig up the url at present.
The emulator is still a very worthwhile project to look
at however, and despite me using it first as a brickbat
its rather cool and usefull for doing real work.
(Development at home etc)
Raymond
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Received on Sun Apr 28 2002 - 00:02:12 BST