Modern Machines, Modern Metrics

Modern Machines, Modern Metrics

In z17 Sustainability Metrics – Part 0 I wrote about the new z17 Sustainability Metrics, or “Power Consumption”, if you prefer.

This post isn’t part 1 – as I don’t intend to go into much detail about what I’ve learnt so far. I have learnt things, of course.

During the Summer it occurred to me that there are a number of things that are new in z/OS instrumentation on z16 and z17. Regular readers will know that I like to write about them.

I suggested to my friend John Baker of the IntelliMagic team that we could do a conference presentation about them. He readily accepted. (John has about the same level of interest in such things as I do – and sees different customers soour collective experience base is wider.)

And so Modern Machines, Modern Metrics was born.

As I alluded to “modern” is both z16 and z17. At least for now.

So what does “M4”¹ cover?

It starts with a pair of z17 topics:

• Sustainability Metrics
• DPU ( Data Processing Unit) or “I/O Engine” as some of us like to call it

Then we talk about a couple of z16 topics.

As l write this, they are:

• Home Addresses
• AIU (Artificial Intelligence Unit)

I say “as I write this” because, as with all my presentations, this one will evolve – as we gain experience. We’re expecting the z17 topics to gradually crowd out the z16 ones.

I think it would be ambitious to hope to schedule this as a two parter, but you never know – and we’re still learning things about how z16 metrics behave. In fact older metrics can still spring surprises.

We gave this presentation a few weeks ago at GS UK Annual Conference. It went very well, I think. We’re about to give the first topic in a meeting with the Development team for Sustainability Metrics. I think they’ll find it interesting. We do have some questions to ask them, around data sources and interpretation – but I think you’d expect that.

And I’d like to think we’d evolve this for future machines.

Making Of

I’m writing this on a plane back from Madrid, mostly using an Apple Pencil Pro. I seemed to have it tamed. But then what is euphemistically called “light chop” 😊 intervened. I was doing well, really I was. 😊 The Bay Of Biscay is a harsh mistress.²

This is a new keyboard on the iPad Mini. More expensive than the previous one but it’s well worth the money.

But, again, some exotic (not really in my opinion) keys require strange finger acrobatics.

One cute thing is the keyboard can be made to light up – in different colours. And cycle between them. 😊