Author Archives: Martin Packer

After a long hiatus, I’m back with a new screencast. It’s about HiperDispatch. I pulled together the slides on a long flight back from the Far East last year and I’ve been fiddling with them occasionally ever since. Anyhow I hope you enjoy it. You can find it here.

I previously wrote about SMT in Born With A Measuring Spoon In It’s Mouth in 2016 – before z14 was announced. I also wrote about it again in 2016 in SMT – Some Actual Graphs. It’s been a year since z15 was announced so enough time has passed for me to want to write aboutContinue reading “Engineering – Part Five – z14 IOPs”

Back in May (2020) I published filterCSV, An Open Source Preprocessor For Mind Mapping Software. To recap a little, the premise was very simple: I wanted to create a tool that could automate colouring nodes in a mind map, based on simple filtering rules. The format I chose was iThoughts’ CSV file format. (It couldContinue reading “filterCSV – 4 Months On”

(This post follows on from Engineering – Part Two – Non-Integer Weights Are A Thing, rather than Engineering – Part Three – Whack A zIIP). I was wondering why my HiperDispatch calculations weren’t working. As usual, I started with the assumption my code was broken. My code consists of two main parts: Code to buildContinue reading “Engineering – Part Four – Activating And Deactivating LPARs Causes HiperDispatch Adjustments”

A few years ago I built a presentation on zIIP Capacity Planning. It highlighted the need for better capacity planning for zIIPs and outlined precisely why zIIPs couldn’t be run as busy as general purpose processors (GCPs). Since then a lot has changed. And I, in common with most people, have a lot more experienceContinue reading “zIIP Capacity And Performance Presentation”

Every year I try to write one new presentation. Long ago, it feels like, I started on my “new for 2020” presentation. It’s the culmination-so-far 🙂 of my “architecture thing”. “What Architecture thing?” some of you might be asking. It’s quite a simple idea, really: It’s the notion that SMF records can be used forContinue reading “So You Don’t Think You’re An Architect?”

(I’m grateful to Dougie Lawson for correcting a few errors in the original version of this.) I don’t often write about IMS and there’s a good reason for it: Only a small proportion of the customers I deal with use it. I regard IMS as being one of those products where the customers that haveContinue reading “IMS Address Space Taxonomy”

There have been a number of WLM Service Definition formatters over the years. So why do we need another one? Well, maybe we don’t but this one is an open source one, covered by the MIT licence. That means you can change it: You could contribute to the project. You could modify it for yourContinue reading “sd2html, An Open Source WLM Service Definition Formatter”

I have a number of ideas for things I want to open source, some directly related to the day job and some not. This post is about one piece of software that I use in my day job but which you probably wouldn’t recognise as relevant to mainframe performance. To me the rule of thumbContinue reading “filterCSV, An Open Source Preprocessor For Mind Mapping Software”