I would like to draw your attention to IBM's announcement of z/OS XL C/C++ V2R1M1. This update will include IBM MASS and ATLAS libraries for z/OS, libraries that exploit the new Vector Facility for z/Architecture available in the IBM z13. There is no additional charge for the IBM MASS and ATLAS libraries -- they will be included with your z/OS XL C/C++ compiler license. My understanding is there are no additional run-time charges either, so you can compile and then deploy to licensed z/OS systems that may or may not have z/OS XL C/C++ compiler licenses.
If you'd like to get a head start understanding this new update, this summary guide is helpful: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27044384&aid=1 The update will be available for download from this Web site in the near future: http://www.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/tools/downloads/index.html Continue monitoring that Web site over the next few weeks. You should see the V2R1M1 update appear on or before general availability of the IBM z13. A z13 server is not a prerequisite for this update or for these new libraries, as I understand it. (Though please check me on that.) Regardless, I would recommend deploying your applications to an IBM z13 server if you make more than occasional, light use of the IBM MASS or ATLAS libraries. IBM Mathematical Acceleration Subsystem (MASS) for z/OS is a collection of mathematical function libraries optimized for z/OS. The Mathematical Acceleration Subsystem software libraries offer improved performance over standard mathematical library routines and are thread-safe. The fully supported Mathematical Acceleration Subsystem libraries are shipped with the IBM XL C/C++ compiler. Mathematical Acceleration Subsystem for z/OS software libraries: * Include accelerated sets of frequently-used mathematical functions for scalar, vector, and single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) libraries. * Allow code to run in multithreaded environments in a thread-safe manner. * Exploit the Vector Facility for z/Architecture, available on the IBM z13. * Assist with portability of vector code. In particular, you can now bring MASS code running on other platforms onto z/OS. ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra) is, according to Wikipedia, a software library for linear algebra (not surprisingly). It's a mature, open source implementation of BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) APIs and some LAPACK APIs. This library on z/OS also exploits the Vector Facility for z/Architecture. IBM MASS and ATLAS are important ingredients in solving various optimization problems. They're particularly useful on z/OS in support of real-time and near real-time analytics within concurrent transaction and batch flows. Though they're probably most familiar to developers with a C/C ++ orientation (and probably also FORTRAN), they are approachable from other programming languages on z/OS as long as you understand C calling conventions. If you'd like to explore these libraries further but are not yet familiar with them I'd recommend looking at the library API references to understand their capabilities. Here's a reference for BLAS: http://www.netlib.org/blas/ And this documentation for the AIX implementation of IBM MASS provides some good background reading until the specific z/OS-related documentation appears: http://www.ibm.com/software/awdtools/mass/aix/mass-aix.html More information is coming, as mentioned, but I did want to get this new z/OS information out to you as soon as IBM announced it since it's quite important and really represents a major new workload category. It's quite fair to say this is a "chunk of supercomputing" inserted into z/OS, a very important chunk that's quite useful to solve a broad range of business and government optimization problems more efficiently and more quickly. Undoubtedly these libraries will also be useful to those of you who would like to bring more open source and other applications to z/OS more easily (and with excellent performance) since they're popular, standard libraries. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM z Systems, AP/GCG/MEA E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
