zaxvenz'March to independence': Christine Lagarde wants EU to ditch Visa, Mastercard for own platform
Humm, this will probably mean that the EU will need to look into if we need to setup a European mainframe manufacturer.
I am talking AS400/iSeries type stuff.
MasterCard and VISA process a huge number of transactions per second, and there can’t be any risk of loosing a transaction in progress, so you need an extremely stable central processing node with very high redundancy.
At the moment I believe that only IBM and Fujistu makes mainframes these days, IBM is American which has now shown to not be an ideal long term trading partner, Fujistu is Japanese, with a strong presence in Europe, but they made the UK Post Office computer system, which makes me want to stay, far, far, far away from them.
Either one, whoever we pick will make it easy to get the system going, but to migrate away will be a nightmare.
I wonder if we could build something on open hardware like Risc-V, this make me wonder is Risc-V would even be suitable for this application
There has been massive progress in distributed computing and consensus algorithms (which is what you need for consistency in a distributed system). We don’t need 1970 style centralised systems anymore.
For normal tasks, absolutely, and if we can do it without a mainframe while maintaining the stability and redundancy of a mainframe system, then we should look into alternatives.
However, mainframes have been in continous development since they were created, there are absolutely tasks they still do better these days.
Like what? I worked with some of them - they are nothing but the software that runs on them. Companies buy them to keep the ancient software they depend on running, not because they’re good or necessary. Software can be rewritten. The companies I worked with got rid of around 50% of their old propritary systems like SystemZ, POWER, Superdome, and NonStop in favour of plain Linux on amd64 in the last 20 years, and the trend is continuing.
I think this is just old style thinking
Cloud and modern technologies are far superior
There is a reason why the fastest most demanding data centers so NOT use any of that old technology
Also, “continuous development since they were created” is pretty much nonsense
It’s technology, it’s all always been in continuous development
Mainframe and other technologies have stagnated for the last several decades
It’s all proprietary so it’s less efficient, less innovative, less secure, too
Oh no, not the fucking cloud.
Didn’t we just talk about taking the data back?
Let’s run our own servers and not a needless third party…
Dude. They are technologies
You can make your own damn cloud if you want to. I think you missed the point entirely