mainframe computers
massive machines that typically live inside of large cabinets okay then Linus so you're talking about a supercomputer right actually no mainframes are defined a little differently in our episode on supercomputers which you can check out here we discussed how they are great at number crunching to complete extremely complex tasks like weather forecasting medical research and crypt analysis but with mainframes the focus is more on throughput and reliability so what exactly does that mean well compared to something like a supercomputer mainframes have a lot more inputs and outputs or i/o because they're often deployed in situations where they aren't working on one massive complex problem but rather they have to process tons of smaller simpler transactions extremely quickly in fact even though there is a popular misconception that mainframes are relics of a bygone computing era to process the up to millions of card swipes and account transfers that occurred daily 96 out of the world's top 100 banks and 23 out of the top 25 US retailers currently run mainframes from IBM who has been the dominant player in the industry for a very long time building one though isn't just a matter of installing a whack ton of Zeon's in a box plugging in lots of ethernet cables and calling it a day mainframes use special CPUs many of which are much larger physically than even big desktop chips like 2011 socket CPUs from Intel as well as additional processors called cysts assistance processors or PSAPs that do almost nothing but move data around as quickly as possible like glorified traffic controllers rather than general-purpose number crunchers and that's not all on a modern mainframe like the top-end IBM's e13 each individual IO card of which there can be a hundred and sixty has its own processing course up to two per channel on the dual channel cards meaning you could have over 600 processor cores just for IO and that's not even counting the saps whoa part of the reason that more mainframes are designed to support this much IO is to ensure that they stay reliable so many of the subsystems inside a mainframe like a modern airliner would have redundancies built-in this means they can be deployed in situations where zero downtime is acceptable such as the aforementioned credit-card companies and retailers as well as airline ticketing systems in fact a common mainframe operating system ibm's proprietary ztp f was originally developed as transaction processing software for airlines if you want to see it in action pay close attention next time you board a flight and you might just get a glimpse of the computer screen they're using to check you in an old-school interface with green text indicates that it's probably a terminal connected to a mainframe just don't look too closely at it so this high level of redundancy means that it's common for mainframes to be built in such a way where an administrator can slide out what are the drawers that houses components and simply start swapping them out whatever that drawer was working on is automatically transferred over to the rest of the mainframe making it easy to make necessary hardware changes without any downtime which is a good thing too because high-end mainframes can run tons of virtual servers at it's up to 8,000 in the case of the z13 meaning that taking down the mainframe could result in a lot of transaction errors on Black Friday but before you start thinking gee I should get myself a mainframe because I want to run overwatch on like some kind of 50 monitor setup mainframes and their operating systems aren't just absurdly expensive a single mainframe can cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars they also aren't designed to run games or for high-end floating-point performance which is important for rendering graphics but even so mainframes are still in the background powering lots of things you do every day which is pretty cool that is unless you've sworn off air travel and you don't want MasterCard to know about all the weird stuff you buy on Amazon speaking of having your online activities tracked tunnel bear VPN lets you anonymize yourself on the internet and browse the internet and use online services as though you are some anonymous guy in some other country they have easy-to-use apps for iOS Android PC and Mac they also have a Chrome extension and it's super easy to use you just press a button and boom tunnel bears on your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption and your public IP address gets switched so you show up as though you are in a different country tunnel bear makes it easy by bypassing all the annoying det
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