NASA switches off last mainframe

NASA has shut down its last mainframe, the space agency's chief information officer announced over the weekend.

Linda Cureton said on Saturday that some organisations still needed the transaction-oriented capabilities of Big Iron, which allows for huge numbers of inputs and outputs, but NASA was not one of them.

"This month marks the end of an era in NASA computing. Marshall Space Flight Centre powered down NASA's last mainframe, the IBM Z9 Mainframe," Cureton said in a blog post.

After explaining what a mainframe is, for the benefit of "millennial readers", Cureton went on point out that "things like virtual machines, hypervisors, thin clients, and swapping are all old hat to the mainframe generation though they are new to the current generation of cyber youths".

"In my first stint at NASA, I was at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center as a mainframe systems programmer when it was still cool," Cureton reminisced. "That IBM 360-95 was used to solve complex computational problems for space flight. Back then, I comfortably navigated the world of IBM 360 Assembler language and still remember the much-coveted 'green card' that had all the pearls of information about machine code."

Cureton went on to note that the user interfaces for mainframes are "clunky and somewhat inflexible", but added that the giant computers were extremely reliable and still needed in many organisations.

Mainframes are indeed still useful for many organisations that need to process data in bulk. However, they are more useful in terms of reliability than speed. These days, NASA's requirements are served by supercomputers, grid computing and the cloud.