Don't keep your CPU waiting: Speed Reading for machines

Project and Program: MVS, MVS Core Technologies

Tags: Proceedings, 2018, SHARE St. Louis 2018

My mother was happy that I loved reading as a kid.  I’d stay up half the night with my nose in a book.  On the other hand, if I spent too much time reading, I was tired and unproductive the next day.  Your systems read (and write) enormous volumes of data as well – perhaps terabytes per second.  While I was only reading a single page at a time, IT systems may read from tape, disk (including solid state), system paging area, main memory, and multiple levels of processor caches.  These areas vary dramatically in size – but more importantly – they are not accessed at the same speed!
One of the greatest challenges in IT today is balancing speeds across various components in your systems.  Storage of all flavors has grown bigger but not faster, compared to CPU speeds.  Today’s CPU’s process at over 5 billion cycles per second and we all know the adage: “all CPU’s wait at the same speed”.  The key is to make as many of those cycles as productive as possible.
This session will discuss the many tiers of storage in IT systems and offer ideas about how to optimize access to those areas.  Don’t keep your CPU waiting – your mom will be proud!-John Baker-DataKinetics

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