Advances in the IBM z13 I/O function and capability

Integrated high-performance data compression in the IBM z13

“…Hardware design points The zEDC hardware design points are consistent with the broader goals of the z System* platform with respect to input/output (I/O) devices [2]. The form-factor of the zEDC Express is a PCI Express** (PCIe**) card.…”

“…Each DDCB contains all information required to execute the request, such as the command (compress or decompress), pointers to the input and output buffers, and compressor/ decompressor state information. The scheduler checks all active queues of the Physical Function (PF) [2] and up to 15 Virtual Functions (VFs) [2] in a round-robin fashion to find the next pending DDCB.…”

“…With middleware and application exploitation, zEDC can reduce the amount of data at rest and in-flight in an enterprise, yielding lower system cost and providing the business advantages that accrue from keeping more data readily accessible. The zEDC feature is the combination of a hardware feature (zEDC Express)Vmade possible by advances in the I/O infrastructure [1,2]Vwith a z/OS* software feature. zEDC provides industry-standard data compression and decompression of sequential data with a throughput that is two orders of magnitude faster than existing software solutions.…”

The IBM z13 processor cache subsystem

“…It features up to 192 two-way simultaneous multithreaded (SMT2) [1] processors, or cores, operating at 5 GHz, distributed across four fully connected processing drawers. Each drawer consists of two tightly coupled processing nodes, up to 2.5 terabytes (TB) of physical memory, up to 4 legacy Galaxy (GX) I/O adapters, and 10 integrated PCIe** x16 Generation-3 I/O hubs [2], along with an enhanced four-level cache design. Combined, these features provide up to 50% more system capacity throughput than the IBM zEnterprise* EC12 (zEC12) [3,4].…”

IBM z13 firmware innovations for simultaneous multithreading and I/O virtualization

“…The bandwidth, latency, and scalability improvements in the z13 PCIe infrastructure [20] enable the virtualization and sharing of I/O adapter hardware by multiple operating systems using the PCIe SR-IOV functionality. This standard to represent virtualized adapters attached via the PCIe interconnect was introduced by PCI-SIG in 2007 [21].…”