Tuesday, January 12, 2016

IBM targets flexible mainframes with open source golang on z Systems

In a post on GitHub, the popular code-sharing site, #BigBlue made both its port available and its #Linux on #IBM z Systemsproject.

Firstly, the idea of bringing the open-source Go programming language to its z Systems mainframes would bear significance in that it gives an option to customers that want to pair the mainframe with Linux and Go-based apps; it also gives more flexibility to the mainframe.

Go, which is commonly known as golang, was developed by Google and released in 2009. It is designed to make it easy to build simple, reliable and efficient software.

Since its release it has had more than 780 contributors making over 30,000 commits to the project and on GitHub it has more than 90,000 repositories. The point being that it is a popular language and one that appears to be growing.

The language is particularly good for network applications which require strong levels of concurrency. Projects the language is typically used for includes APIs, Web servers and minimal frameworks for Web applications.

Other users of the technology include Google, Docker and CloudFlare.

The significance of the move, in addition to giving customers more options, is that Docker is written in the Go language, meaning that z Systems and Docker can work more closely together.

Big Blue saw its z Systems mainframe revenue increase by 15% in its latest quarter compared to a year ago.

The Go programming language can also be used for high performance computing, as the Richard Feynman Centre for Innovation at the Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed the LANL Go Suite. 
This suite provides Go with the mechanisms required for using the language in a supercomputing environment.

While the z Systems mainframe market is improving for IBM, there is also demand in the High Performance Computing market for new systems, Cray for example has improved the forecast for its 2015 revenue outlook to between $720 million to $725 million up from $715 million.

http://www.cbronline.com/news/big-data/hardware/ibm-targets-flexible-mainframes-with-open-source-golang-on-z-systems-4774967

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