
The Deathrow OpenVMS Cluster - privong
http://deathrow.vistech.net/deathrow.shtml
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akg_67
Very cool. Good to see OpenVMS is still alive and kicking that also on
AlphaServer. It is the best command line operating system I ever used. Never
liked unix variants after that. Commands are so intuitive copy is copy not cp.
File versioning is the best. I never had to worry about saving versions of my
Fortran code files.

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cturner
Hacker news is very unix focused. This is convenient, but I'd love to see some
more blog posts about what's made platforms like VMS or mainframe platforms
awesome to work with. (where do these crowds hang out?)

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akg_67
HP OpenVMS site [http://h71000.www7.hp.com](http://h71000.www7.hp.com) maybe
the starting point to further explore it. Also, they have a hobbyist license
available for free. I haven't been involved with VMS since 2000 so not sure
where such people hang out.

I started my career as Fortran developer on OpenVMS for process control
systems and process simulations in early 90s. OpenVMS was the choice platform
for most mission critical/ life critical operations and for manufacturing
process simulations then.

We ran a few pair of OpenVMS nodes in cluster to operate multimillion dollar
petrochemical production facility. The share-everything clustering was cool. I
don't think I have seen that since.

Actually OpenVMS helped me make transition from petrochemical to technology in
2000. A tech company was trying to find someone with prior experience in
OpenVMS to support customers using their optical storage library management
software on OpenVMS/Alpha. That's when I transitioned from controls to data
storage.

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omnibrain
And it looks like as if OpenVMS escaped the deathbed once again:
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9250087/HP_gives_Open...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9250087/HP_gives_OpenVMS_new_life)

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zvrba
A question for the more knowledgeable: I remember reading that OpenVMS was not
ported to i386 (and later) because the CPU didn't have sufficient support. Can
somebody elaborate on what exactly CPU features OpenVMS needs?

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ch_123
It is sometimes claimed that x86 cannot support VMS because VMS makes use of
four CPU protection rings, despite the fact that x86 has four protection
rings...

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dfox
4 protection rings of x86 are mostly not usable for anything, as they apply to
descriptors, not memory page (there is only single user/supervisor bit in page
table entry). The whole 286 descriptor based memory protection model is mostly
unusable for C-and-separate-processes multitasking model (and has relatively
significant overhead).

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shmerl
_> The cluster supports many programming languages, including: BASIC, C/C++,
Fortran, Cobol, Ada (on Alpha), Bliss, Macro32, DCL scripting, Java, and
Pascal._

That's probably historical, but I wonder what's the point to advertise that
the cluster supports Cobol for example?

~~~
dlitz
Because COBOL is alive and well. It's not _interesting_ , but it's far from
dead.

A friend of mine works on a COBOL system that's responsible for calculating
pension payments for former government employees. COBOL is good enough for
this application, since it's basically just a glorified pile of if-statements.

Rewriting everything in the hot-new-language-of-the-year would almost
certainly introduce bugs, so instead of screwing up people's pension checks
every couple of years, they just pay a my friend to know COBOL and to keep the
rules up to date.

There's still enough of a community behind COBOL that there's really no reason
not to do this. COBOL compilers continue to be maintained, and even the
language itself is getting updated (see e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#COBOL_2014](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#COBOL_2014)).

~~~
shmerl
_> Rewriting everything in the hot-new-language-of-the-year would almost
certainly introduce bugs_

Yes, that's the point I usually hear. I.e. that it's used for legacy
applications, just because switching to anything else doesn't worth the
effort. I'd be more surprised however when it would be used for any _new_
project.

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epynonymous
wow, i worked on openvms for my first job out of school, amazing operating
system, but i didnt get too much into the kernel, was wrapping cobol apps with
ejb's. a pretty amazing os, you could cluster something like 256 some nodes
and the os would distribute jobs across nodes depending on how you set up a
cluster. i just remember everyone would say the os would have uptime in terms
of years, not hours!

i used to also dabble a bit in dcl, digital command line, which is more like
the shell scripting language for openvms.

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malkia
So what are the features that OpenVMS has that others do not have? (Just
curious)

~~~
omnibrain
I've never used it but I read a lot of accounts of superb clustering
capabilities. You can have clusters spanning several OS releases on different
hardware platforms.

~~~
dfox
Clustering on VMS is mostly about marketing and integration, VMS cluster is
essentially only about shared filesystem and same effect can be had by means
of NFS and some kind of centralized management on Unix (even across different
Unix OSes). It does not do any magic like process migration and intra-cluster
shared memory.

From technical standpoint interesting feature is sane approach to asynchronous
IO and IPC (think libevent in kernel).

~~~
xorcist
There is nothing "only" about a clustered shared filesystem.

There may be a hundred of them but none works off the shelf for all
applications. There are a lot of details in there.

You could probably make the point that early Google was "only" a clustered
filesystem plus some apps running on top on it.

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ChikkaChiChi
I love the names of the nodes on Death Row:

JACK [The Ripper] [Ed] GEIN

