Because we were not able to present you with information about the new TPF functions at the Fall 2001 TPF Users Group meeting, other methods of communication, such as the TPF Systems Technical Newsletter, certainly help to fill this information gap.

The planned theme of the Fall 2001 TPF Users Group meeting was "Scalability." Our reason for proposing this theme was quite simple: we have recently redefined what we mean when we talk about TPF and "how big is big."

You might have noticed that we have, in the past, shipped several TPF APARs that refer to support for 32-way loosely coupled processors. With PUT 15, we are pleased to tell you that TPF now supports a loosely coupled complex of up to 32 processors. Combined with existing support for as many as 16 engines, you can now apply the combined power of up to 512 zSeries- or S/390-class engines to your TPF system. That is a certainly a lot of parallel processing capacity!

I dislike talking about MIPS when sizing a system because, as we all know, MIPS depend on the workload profile; but to put this parallel processing capacity into perspective, you can now apply in excess of 75,000 MIPS against your TPF database with this newly released support. Only a few years ago when S/390 J-class processors were the newest machines, you would have been able to apply less than 1000 MIPS against a single database.

Another project that you will find on PUT 15 is FARF6, which provides 8-byte file addressing. We do not use all the bits in those 8 bytes for record addressing, only 56 of them; but this means that we can address its 2⁵⁶ bits worth of records. Even the most ambitious application will take some time to use that many records---72 quadrillion to be exact. This is more than you could fit on a TPF database because disk capacity is not quite that high, but the capacity is impressive.

If we examine some of the new functions prior to PUT 15, we can find other examples of the scalability of TPF. The TPF Internet Mail Server was designed to handle a database of 250,000,000 mail boxes. We have provided high-bandwidth communications capacity with functions such as support of the OSA-Express card for TCP/IP, and enhancements for our MQSeries support, which we refer to as turbo MQSeries.

There are many other examples of projects that have eliminated constraints and improved the scalability of TPF: improvements to memory use, the ability to use larger than 4-K program objects, and others. We are proud to be able to announce that 32-way loosely coupled support and FARF6 now add to our ability to scale to meet the requirements of the ever-growing transaction processing world.

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