Nasa Powers Down its Last IBM Mainframe
Posted on Thu, Feb 16, 2012 @ 06:31 AM
NASA’s Chief Information Officer, Linda Cureton, announced in a blog on February 11, 2012 that NASA has shut down its last mainframe — the IBM Z9 Mainframe — a two-ton, 56 square-foot monster running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4), stating, "This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing.”
IBM's participation in the U.S. space program dates back to the 1950s when as Cureton puts it; mainframes were “the size of a Cape Cod.” She went on to define what a mainframe is for her “millennial readers,” saying “it’s a big computer that is known for being reliable, highly available, secure, and powerful. They are best suited for applications that are more transaction oriented and require a lot of input/output – that is, writing or reading from data storage devices.” She also said that things like virtual machines, hypervisors, thin clients, and swapping are all old hat to the mainframe generation.
Cureton explained, "That IBM 360-95 was used to solve complex computational problems for space flight. Back then, I comfortably navigated the world of IBM 360 Assembler language and still remember the much-coveted 'green card' that had all the pearls of information about machine code. Back then, real systems programmers did hexadecimal arithmetic – today, “there’s an app for it!”"
Even though NASA has ended their era of mainframes, there are still many organizations that require the use of mainframes. Cureton stated, “The need remains for extremely reliable, secure transaction-oriented business applications.” Mainframe computers play a central role in the daily operations of most of the world's largest corporations, including many Fortune 1000 companies. Since the introduction of the IBM® System/360™ in 1964, the mainframe owes much of its popularity and longevity to its inherent reliability and stability, a result of continuous technological advances.
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