Re: MVS 3.8j (TK5) Crashes on Massive SORT
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Since (until a month ago) my entire systems career was in Houston... And the shop I ran into JES3 at was Rockwell Shuttle Operations Corporation, a NASA/JSC contractor.
I always thought it was borderline blasphemy that JSC, the site HASP was originally developed for, turned into a JES3 shop...
On Thu, Nov 21, 2024 at 1:53?PM Sterling Garwood via <slgarwood= [email protected]> wrote: JES3 was a bit weird, but remember its heritage - West Coast ASP etc….originally 7094/7040-like system. HASP was a Houston child, My first systems programmer job was in a HASP shop then I moved to a JES3 shop as they were converting to MVS. Definitely grey hair creator!! HASP/JES2 was a true KISS tool. Simple, did everything well and an example of a clean well thought out piece of code. Simpson and Crabtree should be proud. I enjoyed using JES3 but it was a bear to maintain and the whole shared tape pool concept never worked well IMHO. Maybe my view is colored by some local mods that clobbered the JES3 spool every so often until one of the IBM guys said in effect “you can’t do that, you will cause spool destruction”. IBM loved ASP and JES3 since you basically had buy another system to run the dispatch and control functions. We had ISTR 3 370/168 systems in a triplex. Then a couple of 3033s then 3090s.
Yeah, I can see how you might be chary of testing the waters. MVS 3.8 was kinda iffy for MP/AP support, especially early on, but in the 1982-1983 timeframe, it had gotten pretty solid, at least on the 370/158AP that was my first systems job. I haven't had a problem in Hercules attributable to emulating MPs on SMP hosts in a couple of decades, myself, and I've run a pretty wide range of code on it. FWIW, JES2 shared spool was problematic longer than MVS MP/AP support... I never ran JES3 myself, except at one shop I worked at in the late 80s. Always struck me as too foreign. On Thu, Nov 21, 2024 at 12:29?PM Sterling Garwood via <slgarwood= [email protected]> wrote: I have always been suspicious of Hercules/Herculon in the area of multiprocessors. My rule of thumb is to run one cpu (the Gene Amdahl model). The whole interaction of MVS MP, Hercules support of MP, and how it interacts with the underlying hardware if it has multiple processors seems to me to be an unnecessary complication and everything has to work right. No bugs in MVS MP support (ya sure), no bugs in Hercules and its bolted on MP support,? and no bugs in the underlying system (again - ya sure). I have run OSX and Linux and seen different types of strange problems pop up in both cases. Now throw in Apple Silicon and Power and Efficiency cores. Too much to mess with unless you have never spent a weekend in an MVS data center recovering a JES3 complex and want to see how that feels - I have (or used to).
The issues I have seen over the years seem to me to be an unnecessary complication. If I want to pump more work I just duplicate a UP and run either JES2 shared spool or JES3.
Just my 2 cents worth. From an old grey beard.
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