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0 pointsjeffbee2y ago0 comments

Getting stupefying amounts of I/O on AWS is as simple as turning a knob and getting out your credit card. The kind of throughput quoted in the article—48GB/s—is achievable on AWS for $250k/year, list price.

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6 comments · 3 top-level

dralley2y ago· 2 in thread

But let's say you want that data compressed and/or encrypted, you're going to need an awful lot of compute to exploit that 48GB/s if it's possible at all.

Whereas on mainframe the service processors can deal with it transparently to the CPU using specialized hardware.

And let's say it's financial transactions - fixed-point decimal arithmetic. On mainframe, that can be hardware accelerated too.

jeffbeeOP2y ago

Yes, and it's interesting how Intel is moving in that direction with their Xeon line, integrating the QAT peripheral for compression and encryption offloading. Unfortunately these things are unicorns and that aren't generally available in the cloud, either.

ghaff2y ago

Well, the general approach over the past 30 years or so has just been to mostly go with generic x86 hardware which would get predictably faster year-over-year and software could be written pretty generically for those platforms. With performance growth slowing, one of the answers has been to have more heterogenous and special function hardware and the software people will just have to deal with it.

ElectricalUnion2y ago· 1 in thread

I thought such throughput would cost around 30 274 560 USD/year (60 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 48 * 0.02) on data transit fees alone.

jeffbeeOP2y ago

Obviously it would be very foolish to use an AWS storage backend for an application that was not also in AWS.

That said, it is not at all clear to me that the TCO of a maxed-out IBM DS8900F is less than $30 million/year.

That is one channel of throughput, and a mainframe can have many channels, though.

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