I do not have a Masters or a PhD. I have a College of Business Bachelor of Science in Mgmt Information Systems from 1974.
With a business degree, I became totally fascinated by what I consider to be one of the most transformative business tools during the past 50 years, the IBM mainframe, now named IBM Z and LinuxONE. This fascination led me down a career path of applying mainframe technology to a wide variety of businesses followed by my current assignments to assist others with their IBM Z technology (hardware and software) learning journeys.
Why do I like to teach?
While it is rewarding to see others get it, develop careers, and succeed, I have come the conclusion the reason for my desire to teach involves:
- Requirement to continually learn to help others
- Improving my personal communication skills by explaining complex technology succinctly to help others grasp something that took me a long time to grasp.
- Continued fascination about the limitless potential of this remarkable business tool known as the IBM Z mainframe.
What prompted me to write this blog in the educator hub was a post in the Open Mainframe Project, OMP, slack workspace hosted by Linux Foundation.
Someone brand new to OMP identified themself as new, then asked a question in a nearly dead slack channel, z-assembler-community.
I wanted to share the post because it has all the elements of why I like to teach plus a glimpse of the IBM Z mainframe limitless future transforming business.
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So what's everyone's favorite machine instruction on z?
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fascinating question....I was bored this morning and gave this some thought....1st ... I realized IBM has moved the Principles of Operation ---again--- but I found it ....my immediate favorite is NNPA (Neural Network Processing Assist)...why .... I know nothing about it, but it appears to exist for the future capabilities of IBM Z and LinuxONEAs I started to think about NNPA use case, a quick internet search challenged the need to know and directed those that are curious to https://github.com/IBM/zDNN .... a documented application interface.....2nd favorite machine instruction is BR unconditional - x'47F0' (just go there without my logic explaining why).3rd favorite is TM x'91' ..... I once spent a week (decades ago) deciphering JES3 code to make a modification to a JES3 command default behavior to find this incredibly clever TM that seemed to control the majority of the JES3 logic behavior.... it was way beyond anything I would have dreamed up.I have not done any serious assembler programming maintenance or writing anything from scratch for decades because these days zArchitecture assembler is the domain of deep hardware development, deep compiler development, and futures such as zDNN
NNPA must have elaborate microcode and millicode behind it to exploit the newer processing capabilities of Telum II, AIU, and Spyre
my swag .... zDNN exists to make all those AI and ML intensive algorithms (some decades old) faster and less energy intensive along with using smaller and better trained models --- micro-service model approach ... the future of IBM Z z/OS (zCX), Linux on Z, and LinuxONE
I welcome your comments and thoughts.