this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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[โ€“] [email protected] 25 points 2 days ago (2 children)

with all the transactions all around the world can you imagine the money they're making by doing literally nothing and if this move is successful how much money they stand to lose? I would be surprised if they were not literally talking to hitmen right now.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago

All for it! The orange fucking idiot is fusing the EU.

[โ€“] [email protected] 39 points 2 days ago (16 children)

HEY GUYS! YOULL NEVER GUESS. Portugal already has such a platform! Even Romania has started using it!

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[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Dโ‚ฌ will hopefully replace them. Important FAQ

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

I have a friend who works on this project. Still years away, but they are at least thinking very hard of not having US dependencies since the last months. I don't have much trust in some people involved though (exactly because for many this was not an issue until a few weeks ago).

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Humm, this will probably mean that the EU will need to look into if we need to setup a European mainframe manufacturer.

I am talking AS400/iSeries type stuff.

MasterCard and VISA process a huge number of transactions per second, and there can't be any risk of loosing a transaction in progress, so you need an extremely stable central processing node with very high redundancy.

At the moment I believe that only IBM and Fujistu makes mainframes these days, IBM is American which has now shown to not be an ideal long term trading partner, Fujistu is Japanese, with a strong presence in Europe, but they made the UK Post Office computer system, which makes me want to stay, far, far, far away from them.

Either one, whoever we pick will make it easy to get the system going, but to migrate away will be a nightmare.

I wonder if we could build something on open hardware like Risc-V, this make me wonder is Risc-V would even be suitable for this application

[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

There has been massive progress in the last 40 years in distributed computing and consensus algorithms (which is what you need for consistency in a distributed system). We don't need 1970 style centralised systems anymore.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (4 children)

For normal tasks, absolutely, and if we can do it without a mainframe while maintaining the stability and redundancy of a mainframe system, then we should look into alternatives.

However, mainframes have been in continous development since they were created, there are absolutely tasks they still do better these days.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Like what? I worked with some of them - they are nothing but the software that runs on them. Companies buy them to keep the ancient software they depend on running, not because they're good or necessary. Software can be rewritten. The companies I worked with got rid of around 50% of their old propritary systems like SystemZ, POWER, Superdome, and NonStop in favour of plain Linux on amd64 in the last 20 years, and the trend is continuing.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

CPUs don't make something a mainframe, the whole system design does. They're transaction-based throughput monsters with all kinds of bells and whistles when it comes to reliability, seamless fallover, etc. The European CPU initiative currently focuses on supercomputing (weather simulations and such) which is a completely different beast when it comes to dataflow but certainly a good foundation for general compute.

Looking into my crystal ball, at some point SAP is going to enter the hardware business.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Mainframes have nothing to do with this.

RISCV is still just a computer - would work just fine on a logical level. Raw compute would be an issue with today's hardware.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Are there any companies working on something like that?

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