Improve Performance with Multiprocessors

Today’s multiprocessor computers offer superior performance on mainframe platforms. The challenge is to use that computing power to its ultimate advantage. MP/204 from Rocket meets the challenge.

MP/204 enables a single copy of Model 204 to leverage multiprocessing configurations on System z Processors running z/OS. The result - significant performance enhancements in both system throughput and response times by utilizing parallel CPU processing.

MP/204 can provide performance benefits in the following situations:

• Performance is suffering due to high CPU utilization, particularly from CPU intensive operations such as complex processing, large sorts, computation, and analysis
• You are experiencing significant transaction growth in online environments
• New applications are being added to an existing online system
• You have major batch requirements, yet batch windows are shrinking and now overlap with the online scheduler

MP/204 is the answer. It delivers instant scalability to Model 204 applications by optimizing the use of your existing multiprocessor hardware to provide an immediate capacity boost.

Since you do not have to change a line of code to gain the advantages of MP/204, you protect and leverage your investment in existing applications.

The Power Within

The advantages of MP/204 flow from the power within. It provides an immediate and automatic capacity and performance boost in multiprocessor environments.

Without any programmer or user intervention, MP/204 automatically offloads almost all User Language statements and functions. MP/204 has proven its performance benefits at sites running up to twelve parallel processors.

New System Monitoring Statistics

Along with a boost to performance and capacity, MP/204 gives you the tools you need to monitor your system so you can avert problems before they happen.

Included are new system statistics showing CPU utilization per task, scheduler overhead, rate of task switching, WAIT and POST macro statistics, and multi-processor lock contention.

All of this new statistical information is written to the journal dataset and can be queried using existing tools.

MP/204 Commands and Statements

MP/204 also adds commands to monitor tasks and associated offload levels, User Language statements that dictate constructs to be off-loaded, and User Language statements that help identify code that cannot be offloaded. Also, you can use MP/204 User Parameters to specify the number of subtasks attached at initialization, the number of active subtasks at any point in time, and response time versus overhead trade-offs in the scheduler. With MP/204, you can dynamically configure/reconfigure the subtask configuration.

Model 204 V7R1 Enhancements

Prior to the release of Model 204 V7R1 in March 2009, MP/204 customers could achieve symmetric multi-processor utilization of up to 650 percent. But some customers were forecasting growth rates that would challenge even this amount of raw processing power. Consequently, Model 204 V7R1 includes an extensively re-engineered version of MP/204 that further increases the multi-processing capabilities of Model 204 up to 850 percent, thereby allowing a single copy of Model 204 to use up to 8,000 MIPS when running on a large System z10.

System Requirements

• Model 204 Version 6 Release 1.0 and above
• IBM z/OS Version 1.07 and above
• Multiprocessor hardware configuration