As we noted in the previous post about performance, there are some conflicting performance claims about these systems, depending on where you look. Since the last post was more popular than expected, we’ve decided to do a short follow-up, this time relying on details from various Honeywell sales documents, such as the Series 6000 Summary Description (1971) and Honeywell Large Systems Product Guide (1984).
This post aims to show how the performance of systems implementing the 600/6000-series mainframe architecture evolved across hardware generations — and where the DPS8M Simulator fits in. It is not intended as an exhaustive reference for all models, instead focusing on the four generations of machines that ran the Multics operating system.
Although exact details are often unclear (and we don’t have original systems available to run new benchmarks), we can present the graphic above, representing the various systems that were used for running Multics, with a very high level of confidence.
DPS8M R3.0.2 is coming soon.
DPS8M R3.0.2 will be an incremental release that includes bug fixes and performance enhancements developed over the last year, and is intended to get these improvements into the hands of our users before the release of the next major version of the simulator, which will include new features (and potentially breaking changes).
APT / DNF / Yum / Brew / Pacman repositories for DPS8M are available.
If you use an RPM-based Linux distribution with the DNF (or Yum) package manager (including Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Amazon Linux 2, and compatibles such as Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, EulerOS, etc.), a DEB-based Linux distribution (including Ubuntu, Debian, Raspberry Pi OS, Mint, etc.), Arch Linux (including Arch Linux 32 and Arch Linux ARM), or Homebrew (on macOS or Linux), you can keep your DPS8M current with automatic updates.
I was recently approached by a friend who needed some help getting DPS8M running on an Android tablet.
The DPS8M simulator has been running on Android devices for a long time now, with early support initially committed back in November 2014, targeting Android 5 Lollipop, by Charles Anthony. This was done in response to a post to the mailing list from a Multics user waiting for the day that a full Multics system could run “in your pocket”.
Finally, you can run dozens of multiprocessing Multics instances along side your mission-critical IBM AIX (PASE) and IBM i (OS/400) workloads on IBM Power Systems hardware!
This is the virtualization solution your IT department has been waiting for… well, perhaps it isn’t — but supporting this platform is a great demonstration of both the capabilities of the IBM PASE for i (Portable Application Solutions Environment) runtime for enabling OSS on IBM i, and the excellent compatibility and portability of the DPS8M simulator software.
