3 Nov
2019
3 Nov
'19
8:05 a.m.
Thaks Clem.
Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 7:11 AM
<arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
Glad to know that I remembered correctly.
In the early 90s I worked teaching multi-vendor Unix courses. One
frustration was that AIX on the 370 and AIX on the PS/2 were essentially
the same as each other but very different from AIX on the RS/6000
machines. A co-worker and I wrote a short essay about if IBM made
cooking equipment:
The IBM Industrial Furnace and the IBM camping stove
would be almost, but not quite entirely, totally different
from the IBM Home Oven.
Or something like that. I can't find the original.
Tom,
Thanks.
AIX/370 existed and I *think* would boot on bare metal instead of running
on top of VM. I don't know what, if any, relationship it had to the
Locus work. (In the late '80s I worked at a university computing center
with VMS, Suns, and IBM gear; so I'm recalling what I heard. I never
actually saw AIX/370 running.)
AIX/370 and AIX/386 were done for IBM under contract by Locus Computing
Corporation (a.k.a. LCC)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_Computing_Corporation> . And yes,
most customers that I knew ran it bare metal. Because of TCF (Transparent Computing Facility), PS/2
based PC were
clustered with the 370s, under a single system image (i.e. up to 32
processors of any time, looked to the world like a single processor). The
OS looked at the binary and found a properly provisioned system in the
cluster to execute it. So you could have require option hardware that only
one node might have, and the process would be migrated to that node. It
also meant nodes could and be added and removed dynamically.
Very cool.
The ideas were recreated as 14 different technologies
called Transparent
Network Computing (TNC) that would end up in the FOSS community and added
to Linux 2x kernel as: OpenSSI <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSI>
Am I wrong, or does nobody actually use this today? The opessi.org
home page link from Wikipedia just seems to hang. And the files on the
SourceForge page are 5 years old.
Thanks,
Arnold