The SIMD accelerator for business analytics on the IBM z13
Eric M. Schwarz, Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, Colin Parris, J. D. Bradbury, Ijeoma M. Nnebe, Michael K. Gschwind · IBM Journal of Research and Development · 2015
IBM z Systems™ have been hosting critical business applications across several industries including banking, healthcare, insurance, and retail for over 50 years. With the recent growth in the use of analytics in the business environment, more customers are seeking to integrate analytics into their core operational environments to enable real-time insight on operational data for competitive advantage. IBM z Systems support very high-performance computation for business analytics. The z System processors are typically higher frequency than any general-purpose microprocessor, and with the zEnterprise® 196 (z196) system, huge gains in performance were made through out-of-order execution. The robust cache hierarchy also provides additional performance boosts to high concurrency analytics operations. The IBM z13™ extends these performance improvements with a new SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) engine in the processor for targeted acceleration of business analytics workloads. This SIMD engine supports new instructions for three data types: integer, string, and floating-point. We provide an overview of the z13 SIMD architecture and show how it advances current architectures. We also discuss the compiler and math library support for this new architecture and provide a few examples of applications that can be accelerated by this new hardware feature on the z13.