How India Helps Build The World's Most Powerful Mainframe Computer Which All Of Us Use

Our PCs are fast, our smartphones are even faster. But when it comes to running some of the most visited websites and services online, you know the computer handling those tasks will have to be one of the best in the business.

It better be, seeing how it can do one trillion transactions per day, handling 92% of all top banking traffic, Over 70% of worldwide insurance work and 92% of airline bookings, and then some. And a significant amount of its development work happens in India, thanks to the ingenuity of Indian engineers. That's definitely something to be proud of, don't you think?

Of course, this mythical behind-the-scenes online platform that quietly powers our digital life is nothing but the IBM z15 mainframe. If you don't know, IBM is one of the pioneers of the computer era, and the z15 is the latest version of its mainframe computer. We spoke with Akhtar Ali, VP, Technical Computing Development, Systems & Technology Group at IBM and Vishwanath Ramaswamy, Director - Systems at IBM India & South Asia to better understand some of the heavy lifting done by the z15 mainframe and India's contribution to its legacy.

The z15 mainframe computer has 9.2 billion transistors, 15.6 miles of wiring and 26.2 billion wire connections. Its on-chip compression throughput is 275 gigabytes per second -- to put this in perspective, about 129 million books have been published in human history, and you could compress all of them with the new z15 chip in just four minutes. It's that quick!

V. Ramaswamy spoke about how HDFC Bank with its existing base of 12.5 million credit card users, with 1 lakh new credit card users being added per month, is powered by IBM's z15 mainframes, as they recently revealed -- that's great validation for the z15 from one of India's largest banks.

IBM

Internationally, Akhtar Ali pointed out how IBM systems are responsible for some of the most demanding workloads in the world. "Last year, under the Coral Project, IBM installed two of the fastest and smartest supercomputers in the world, one at Oakridge National Lab for the US Office of Sciences, and the other at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency in charge of America's nuclear arsenal."

These examples should tell you everything you know about how powerful and reliability of the IBM z15 mainframe. But how did India contribute to this mainframe's advancement?

"The IBM team in India (Bengaluru and NCR) has been involved in mainframe hardware development since z11, so this is the fifth generation with z15," Akhtar Ali confirmed, explaining how the India team's mature and seasoned enough, doing all aspects of hardware development, starting from product definition to design and development. "We do a lot of chip verification, validation work, chip layout, and even power management in this particular release of z15. In fact, the design and development of the NXU or Nest Acceleration Unit which allows compression and encryption of data at rest and in flight was done solely out of India. Some of the most difficult amount of work was done by the India team," according to Akhtar Ali, an IBM veteran of over 29 years.

Not just on the hardware front, the India team specifically worked on z15's software security, designing a storage link encryption and secure service containers -- to ensure data is secure on hard drives. In fact, IBM claims that the z15 mainframe's policy-based controls can instantly revoke access to partners in a client's supply chain in case of a breach. Hypothetically, this means something like the Cambridge Analytica data scandal at Facebook could've been completely avoided, if it were based off a z15 mainframe on its backend.

IBM

It's great that Indian engineers are building innovations for the world, but that doesn't change the fact that Intel's a big competitor for the mainframe when it comes to chasing opportunities in the cloud computing era.

"You definitely have choices with x86, but if you were to really look at an open-source driven, highly secure hardware and software cloud-services stack, then nothing beats the good old mainframe," according to V. Ramaswamy, "as there's nothing proprietary about it."