IBM z15 replaces the former I/O attached accelerator for DEFLATE, zEnterprise Data Compression (zEDC) Express, with an on-chip accelerator that can be synchronously accessed via an instruction. The integration of this new accelerator in the z/OS software stack has been designed to maintain a consistent user experience for software packages that used the previous technology, while still allowing the enhanced aspects of the new technology to deliver the additional value. Two different access paths for DEFLATE have been created in z/OS to accomplish both goals. For user space programs that utilize the zlib API, z/OS directly executes the instruction synchronously, which avoids overhead and reduces latency. Authorized users continue to utilize existing infrastructure and have the Service Assist Processors (SAP) perform compression in an asynchronous fashion on their behalf. The SAP receives information about the requested task via a thin and efficient communication path to z/OS, invokes the instruction in a well-defined fashion, and returns the result to z/OS.This article describes the integration of DEFLATE acceleration in z15 into the z/OS software stack in both synchronous and asynchronous mode and presents the resulting performance for selected workloads.

The IBM z14 is designed for cognitive and analytics processing to support business use cases. With the explosive growth in the amount and richness of data and data-driven business processes, being able to process, analyze, and apply machine learning in a timely and efficient manner is often a business necessity. Improvements to the single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) facility, as well as improvements to Java garbage collection, provide improved support for different software packages. Software such as Apache Spark has been enabled for both z/OS and Linux on z to provide the software infrastructure required for cognitive and analytics processing while new software such as IBM Machine Learning for z/OS provides additional assistance for data scientists. End-to-end cross-platform solutions that require data that is stored on the z14 can also be improved using these new software and hardware capabilities. This paper explores the various hardware capabilities of z14, as well as the enabling software and end-to-end solutions.

The IBM zEnterprise® Data Compression (zEDC) feature provides integrated high-performance data compression to the IBM z13™ and zEnterprise EC12 and BC12 processors. zEDC is a combined hardware feature (zEDC Express) and z/OS® software solution that provides high-performance, industry-standard-compliant compression and decompression. The zEDC Express device and the z/OS device support have been des...