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Path: ...!news.nobody.at!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Architectural implications of locate mode I/O Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2024 15:35:50 -1000 Organization: Wheeler&Wheeler Lines: 83 Message-ID: <87frsnwbd5.fsf@localhost> References: <v61jeh$k6d$1@gal.iecc.com> <1bed88y8na.fsf@pfeifferfamily.net> <v69jgf$1lg1$1@gal.iecc.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Date: Sat, 06 Jul 2024 03:35:53 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="e13bd93f2ce0ce0c86152ba447239d8c"; logging-data="3701759"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18sERMq3Fk4eXdDBo/KU4k3n31Lw3hK/ws=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Cancel-Lock: sha1:rZI6S/zcFeSHvKuY+KLc6iiPDyI= sha1:7rjO0Nyn747LFDAJ9FDVCknCFxQ= Bytes: 5895 John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes: > By putting most of the logic into the printer controller, the 1403 was > not just faster, but only took a small fraction of the CPU so the > whole system could do more work to keep the printer printing. 360 "CKD DASD" and multi-track search trade-off. 360s had relatively little real storage (for caching information) and slow processor, so for program libraries on disk ... they created "PDS" format and had (disk resident, cylinder aligned) directory that contained records for name of each program and its disk location in the library. To load a program, it first did a "multi-track" search of of the PDS directory started at track 0 of the 1st cylinder of the directory ... ran until it found name match (or reached end of cylinder). If name wasn't found at end of cylinder, it would restart if there were additional cylinders in the directory. Trivia: the searched-for program name was in processor memory and the multi-track search operation would refetch the name every time it did a compare for matching name (with records in the PDS directory), monopolizing channel, controller, & disk. Roll forward to 1979, a large national grocery chain had large loosely-coupled complex of multiple 370/168 systems sharing string of DASD containing the PDS dataset of store controller applications ... and was experiencing enormous throughput problems. All the usual corporate performance specialists had been dragged through the datacenter with hopes that they could address the problem ... until they eventually got around to calling me. I was brought into large classroom with tables covered with large stacks of activity/performance reports for each system. After 30-40 mins examaning the reports ... I being to realize the aggregate activity (summed across all systems) for specific shared disk was peaking at 6-7 (total) I/O operations ... and corresponding with severe performance problem. I asked what was on that disk and was told it was the (shared) store controller program library for all the stores in all regions and 168 systems; which I then strongly suspected it was the PDS multi-track search perfoerformance that I had grappled with as undergraduate in the 60s. The store controller PDS dataset was quite large and had a three cylinder directory, resident on 3330 disk drive ... implying that on the avg, a search required 1.5 cylinders (and two I/Os), the first multi-track search I/O for all 19 cylinders would be 19/60=.317sec (during which time that processor's channel was busy, and the shared controller was also busy ... blocking access to all disks on that string, not just the speecific drive, for all systems in the complex) and the 2nd would be 9.5/60=.158sec ... or .475sec for the two ... plus a seek to move the disk arm to PDS directory, another seek to move the disk arm to the cylinder where the program was located .... approx. .5+secs total for each store controller program library load (involving 6-7 I/Os) or two program loads per second aggregate serving all stores in the country. The store controller PDS program library was then split across set of three disks, one dedicated (non-shared) set for each system in the in the complex. I was also doing some work on System/R (original sql/releational RDBMS) and taking some flak from the IMS DBMS group down the road. The IMS group were complaining that RDBMS had twice the disk space (for RDBMS index) and increased the number of disk I/Os by 4-5 times (for processing RDBMS index). Counter was that the RDBMS index significantly reduced the manual maintenance (compared to IMS). By early 80s, disk price/bit was significantly plummeting and system real memory significantly increased useable for RDBMS caching, reducing physical I/Os (while manual maintenance skills costs were significantly increasing). other trivia: when I transfer to San Jose, I got to wander around datacenters in silicon valley, including disk engineering & product test (bldg14&15) across the street. They were doing prescheduled, 7x24, stand-alone mainframe testing. They mentioned they had recently tried MVS, but it had 15min mean-time-between-failure, requiring manual re-ipl/reboot in that environment. I offered to rewrite I/O supervisor to make it bullet-proof and never fail enabling any amount of on-demand, concurrent testing (greatly improving productivity). Downside was they would point their finger at me whenever they had problem and I was spending increasing amount of time diagnosing their hardware problems. 1980 was real tipping point as hardware tradeoff switched from system bottleneck to I/O bottleck (my claims that relative system disk throughput had declined by order or magnitude, systems got 40-50 times faster, disks got 3-5 fasters). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970