Welcome to your IBM i update for November & December 2024.
This month Andy, takes a trip to Wolverhampton for the final i-UG event of the year, where learn more about the IBM i Code Assistant from Douglas Gibbs. Then, Andy explores the rumours of the upcoming Power 11, before finally wishing COBOL a happy 65th Birthday.
You can watch the video below or read the full article underneath.
Watch the Video:
The last UK i-UG Conference of 2024 – Wolverhampton
So, last month, I travelled down to Wolverhampton for the final UK based IBM i event in 2024.
The i-UG Midlands Conference was once again hosted at the Mount Hotel. And, if you’ve not been before, with its period Georgian features, it’s a real delight… as were the obligatory bacon butties and scrumptious pastries that really encourage the community to arrive early.
The event was opened by the i-UG chairman, Mike Ryan who announced record attendance for the event, proving the growing popularity of i-UG within the community.
Another growth area was in education and Mike introduced Liam Naughton, a professor of mathematics and Computer Science at Wolverhampton University who explained that, with the support of i-UG, this year, they’ve supported over 25 students going through the IBM i education program of which 10 masters students were attending this event… and a great bunch of young people they are too.
The conference keynote presentation was completed by the effervescent Canadian Doug Wilson who provided hints on when ‘IBM i Next’ will be with us (spoilers, it’s next year) and some insight into the release schedules for technology refreshes too.
Update into the RPG Code Assistant for IBM i Development
Of most interest was the update into the RPG Code Assistant and what to expect. Doug explained that the plans for the code assistant are for an AI tool that would support four key areas.
First, the tool should be able to explain existing code in natural language and provide contextual information to help understand and support existing legacy code.
Next, it should be able to generate modern, free-format RPG ILE based upon a ‘plain english’ description.
And on creation, of course, you’ll want to test the newly generated program and the assistant will be able to support these activities with test programs and processes.
Finally, Doug explained that it’s an ambition of the IBM i team that the code assistant (if possible) should be able to transform older forms of RPG into modern, free-format ILE based code.
Doug explained, “This is mission-critical code that is still running your mission-critical application. The fact that it’s able to run today goes back to why this is a legendary platform. This business-critical code, we want to make it more efficient, we want to expand upon it, we want to make it talk to the cloud… our business to business vendors. How do we do that? Well, we best do it by modernising and transforming it.”
Now, in a separate article published on the Tech Channel, Steve Will, our IBM i CTO, explained a little more on the projects timeline. And from it’s announcement in May of this year, the project has rocketed along.
Since then, we’ve seen a ‘call to action’ to the IBM i community to submit code and material to train the large language model. Thankfully, the response has been great with submissions from champions, partners and others in the community worldwide. This has allowed IBM to commence with training and fine tuning the model this quarter.
Moving forward, should you have contributed code, you’ll have the opportunity to preview the code assistant in Q1 of 2025. During the preview you’ll be able to interact with it, create code and (more importantly at this stage), provide feedback.
Finally, a year after its announcement, in May 2025 a beta version will be released.
But back to the presentation at the i-UG conference… Doug demonstrated a real-life example of the assistant explaining in natural language, the function of some chosen code [This bit is in the video].
Later in the presentation, Doug passed over to the senior power technical specialist, Andrew Laidlaw who completed a live demonstration on some of the advanced AI features that they’re working on.
Elsewhere, the i-UG was bristling with activity. It was a multi-threaded event with plenty to get your teeth into. From the excellent Tim Rowe and Scott Forstie entertainingly discussing ACS, database extensions and SQL to Richard Dolewski on leverage resilience through IBM i in the cloud, there was a session on what’s new in DB2.
Of course, an i-UG event wouldn’t be an i-UG event without IBM i stalwart, Andrew Youens providing a hands-on workshops. For Wolverhampton, Andy provided full days, real-time workshop on designing, building and deploying a website to IBM i…
Power 11 – Scalable Capabilities to deal with AI
There was no announcement on Power 11 at the event so my eyes cast elsewhere for news on the next generation… and I didn’t have to look far as recently, Bargav Balakrishnan, IBM’s vice president of product management for Power completed an interview with CRN in which he provided a fey tasty morsels of information.
As already discussed, AI is taking a big step forward in product development, but all this new technology requires massive datasets with complex computations performed at high speed and as such, you’ll need extremely fast and efficient processors to run and manage this.
Now, you can’t simply put this strain on the traditional server hardware… no matter how much more powerful the CPU is.
That’s where hi performance computing companies such as NVIDIA come into play – developing specialist enterprise technology specifically for AI, leaving your server to, well, serve!
On Power 11, we’ll see similar technology developed by IBM that will brings scalable capabilities for complex AI models and generative AI.
IBM call this accelerator, Spyre and it features 32 individual accelerator cores onboard, with each Spyre mounted on a PCIe card… so, potentially backwards compatible with Power 10 too?
We don’t know, but we’ll see when more information is released in 2025.
Confirmed news on Power 11 came courtesy of IT Jungle in which they published some more details.
First, Power 11 builds on the foundations of Power 10 but incorporates a refined 7nm manufacturing process to optimise thermal efficiency and clock speeds – this alone could provide a performance boost of up to 20% compared to Power 10.
A standout feature is the enhanced Open Memory Interface (OMI), which provides a substantial uplift in memory bandwidth – three times more in fact, now using DDR5 we’ve gone from 400GB/s on Power 10 to 1,200GB/s on the upcoming Power 11.
COBOL Turns 65 Years Old!
Now, from looking into the future, we’ll turn the other way a look to the past as… did you know, that this year, the common business oriented language or COBOL to you and I, turns 65 this year?
So, a very Happy Birthday COBOL… and if you are a COBOL programmer, hello and welcome to the internet. Sorry, poor joke. COBOL programmers make the better comedians as they always bring their own punch(line) cards! I’ll stop.
One final item, a thank you for reading and watching the IBM i Update.
I’ve been doing this blog for nearly two years now and I hope you see my passion for creating content for you, the IBM i community.
To help me create the content you want, your feedback would be extremely valuable. You can help by completing a really short survey… it’s only six questions and should take just a couple of minutes. Here’s the link: IBM i Update Survey
That’s it for this months update.
Should you wish to view any of the articles featured in full, please check out our IBM i blog here.
Until next time,
Andy
Catch our previous October IBM i Update here. Alternatively, if you’d like to receive the latest IBM i Update hot off the press to your inbox, subscribe to the newsletter version on LinkedIn here.
Posted by Rob on 9th December 2024.