IBM Wants to Make Mainframes Next Platform for Machine Learning

Despite the emphasis on X86 clusters, large public clouds, accelerators for commodity systems, and the rise of open source analytics tools, there is a very large base of transactional processing and analysis that happens far from this landscape. This is the mainframe, and these fully integrated, optimized systems account for a large majority of the enterprise world's most critical data processing for the largest companies in banking, insurance, retail, transportation, healthcare, and beyond. With great memory bandwidth, I/O, powerful cores, and robust security, mainframes are still the supreme choice for business-critical operations at many Global 1000 companies, even if the world does not tend to hear much about them. Of course, as with everything in computing, there are tradeoffs. The cost and flexibility concerns are chief on the list, but the open source push from the outside world is pushing new thinking into an established area.