1.
PowerPC
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PowerPC is a RISC instruction set architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC was the cornerstone of AIMs PReP and Common Hardware Reference Platform initiatives in the 1990s and it has since become niche in personal computers, but remain popular as embedded and high-performance processors. Its use in game consoles and embedded applications provided an array of uses. In addition, PowerPC CPUs are still used in AmigaOne and third party AmigaOS4 personal computers, the history of RISC began with IBMs 801 research project, on which John Cocke was the lead developer, where he developed the concepts of RISC in 1975–78. 801-based microprocessors were used in a number of IBM embedded products, the RT was a rapid design implementing the RISC architecture. The result was the POWER instruction set architecture, introduced with the RISC System/6000 in early 1990, the original POWER microprocessor, one of the first superscalar RISC implementations, was a high performance, multi-chip design. IBM soon realized that a microprocessor was needed in order to scale its RS/6000 line from lower-end to high-end machines. Work on a one-chip POWER microprocessor, designated the RSC began, in early 1991, IBM realized its design could potentially become a high-volume microprocessor used across the industry. IBM approached Apple with the goal of collaborating on the development of a family of single-chip microprocessors based on the POWER architecture and this three-way collaboration became known as AIM alliance, for Apple, IBM, Motorola. In 1991, the PowerPC was just one facet of an alliance among these three companies. The PowerPC chip was one of joint ventures involving the three, in their efforts to counter the growing Microsoft-Intel dominance of personal computing. For Motorola, POWER looked like an unbelievable deal and it allowed them to sell a widely tested and powerful RISC CPU for little design cash on their own part. It also maintained ties with an important customer, Apple, and seemed to offer the possibility of adding IBM too, at this point Motorola already had its own RISC design in the form of the 88000 which was doing poorly in the market. Motorola was doing well with their 68000 family and the majority of the funding was focused on this, the 88000 effort was somewhat starved for resources. However, the 88000 was already in production, Data General was shipping 88000 machines, the 88000 had also achieved a number of embedded design wins in telecom applications. The result of various requirements was the PowerPC specification. The differences between the earlier POWER instruction set and PowerPC is outlined in Appendix E of the manual for PowerPC ISA v.2.02, when the first PowerPC products reached the market, they were met with enthusiasm. In addition to Apple, both IBM and the Motorola Computer Group offered systems built around the processors, Microsoft released Windows NT3.51 for the architecture, which was used in Motorolas PowerPC servers, and Sun Microsystems offered a version of its Solaris OS
2.
Itanium
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Itanium is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture. Intel markets the processors for servers and high-performance computing systems. The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard, and was jointly developed by HP. Itanium-based systems have produced by HP and several other manufacturers. In 2008, Itanium was the fourth-most deployed microprocessor architecture for enterprise-class systems, behind x86-64, Power Architecture, the currently shipping Itanium processor generation, Poulson, was released on November 8,2012. In February 2017, Intel began releasing its successor, Kittson, to test customers, as Intel has not provided a roadmap beyond it and Hewlett-Packard is the only remaining major Itanium vendor, press and analysts have speculated that it will be the last Itanium generation. In 1989, HP determined that Reduced Instruction Set Computing architectures were approaching a processing limit at one instruction per cycle, HP researchers investigated a new architecture, later named Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, that allows the processor to execute multiple instructions in each clock cycle. EPIC implements a form of very long instruction word architecture, in which a single instruction word contains multiple instructions, Intel was willing to undertake a very large development effort on IA-64 in the expectation that the resulting microprocessor would be used by the majority of enterprise systems manufacturers. HP and Intel initiated a joint development effort with a goal of delivering the first product, Merced. Compaq and Silicon Graphics decided to further development of the Alpha. Several groups developed operating systems for the architecture, including Microsoft Windows, OpenVMS, Linux, and UNIX variants such as HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX, and Monterey/64. By 1997, it was apparent that the IA-64 architecture and the compiler were much more difficult to implement than originally thought, technical difficulties included the very high transistor counts needed to support the wide instruction words and the large caches. There were also structural problems within the project, as the two parts of the joint team used different methodologies and had different priorities. Since Merced was the first EPIC processor, the development effort encountered more unanticipated problems than the team was accustomed to, in addition, the EPIC concept depends on compiler capabilities that had never been implemented before, so more research was needed. Intel announced the name of the processor, Itanium, on October 4,1999. Within hours, the name Itanic had been coined on a Usenet newsgroup, a reference to Titanic, by the time Itanium was released in June 2001, its performance was not superior to competing RISC and CISC processors. Itanium competed at the low-end with servers based on x86 processors, Intel repositioned Itanium to focus on high-end business and HPC computing, attempting to duplicate x86s successful horizontal market. POWER and SPARC remained strong, while the 32-bit x86 architecture continued to grow into the enterprise space, only a few thousand systems using the original Merced Itanium processor were sold, due to relatively poor performance, high cost and limited software availability
3.
IBM System z9
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IBM System z9 is a line of IBM mainframe computers. The first models were available on September 16,2005, the System z9 also marks the end of the previously used eServer zSeries naming convention. It was also the last mainframe computer that NASA ever used, System z9 is a mainframe using the z/Architecture, previously known as ESAME. The primary advantage of this arrangement is that memory intensive applications like DB2 are no longer bounded by 31-bit memory restrictions while older applications can run without modifications. With the announcement of the System z9 Business Class server, IBM has renamed the System z9109 as the System z9 Enterprise Class server, IBM documentation abbreviates them as the z9 BC and z9 EC, respectively. There are several enhancements in the System z9 compared to its zSeries predecessors. Some of the include, The Support Element is the most direct. It circumvents even the Hardware Management Console and the system running on the mainframe. The HMC is a PC connected to the mainframe and emulates the Support Element, all preceding zSeries mainframes used a modified version of OS/2 with custom software to provide the interface. System z9s HMC no longer uses OS/2, but instead uses a version of Linux with an OS/2 lookalike interface to ease transition as well as a new interface. Unlike the previous HMC application on OS/2, the new HMC is web-based which means that even local access is done via a web browser, remote HMC access is available, although only over an SSL encrypted HTTP connection. IBM refers to the new HMC as a platform which does not allow the user to install software or access the command line interface to increase security and stability. The HMC is also firewalled by default with a number of open ports for remote access. Program Directed Re-IPL is a new feature for Linux on System z9 and it allows Linux systems running in an LPAR to re-IPL themselves without operator intervention. This is accomplished by the System z9 storing the device and load parameters used to initially IPL the system, DB2, VSAM, and other data storage formats achieve greater I/O performance thanks to a new System z9 feature called a MIDAW. Also, the System z9 introduces the zIIP, a new type of processor that accelerates certain specific DB2 tasks, Java 1.4 and higher support both 32-bit and 64-bit operation on z9. The System z9 also supports the zAAP processor, which allows most of the Java workload to be offloaded from the normal instruction processors, Java workloads executed by the zAAP processor do not count towards the IBM-rated capacity of the z9. This reduces the z9s total cost of ownership compared with other IBM platforms, the zAAP also enables integration of new Java based Web applications with core z/OS backend database environment for high performance, reliability, availability, and security
4.
Linux Foundation
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In recent years, the Linux Foundation has expanded its services through events, training and certification and Collaborative Projects. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects, and standardizes Linux by providing a set of services to compete effectively with closed platforms. The origin of The Linux Foundation can be traced back to 2000 when the Open Source Development Labs was founded. In 2003, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the freely available Linux operating system announced he would join the organization as an OSDL Fellow to work full-time on future versions of Linux. In 2007, OSDL merged with the Free Standards Group, another organization promoting the adoption of Linux, at the time, Jim Zemlin, who headed FSG, took over as executive director of The Linux Foundation. Major parts including OpenPrinting were still offline on October 20,2011, the restoration was complete on January 4,2012. The Linux Foundation serves as a spokesperson for Linux and generates original content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. It also fosters innovation by hosting collaboration events among the Linux technical community, application developers, industry, through the Linux Foundations community programs, end users, developers, and industry members collaborate on technical, legal, and promotional issues. In order for Linux Kernel creator Linus Torvalds and other key developers to remain independent. The Linux Foundation offers application developers standardization services and support that makes Linux an attractive target for their development efforts and these include, the Linux Standard Base and the Linux Developer Network. The Linux Foundation also provides services to key areas of the Linux community, including an open source developer travel fund, through its workgroups, members and developers can collaborate on key technical areas. There is also a program that is vendor-neutral, technically advanced. On March 3,2009, the Linux Foundation announced that they would take over management of Linux. com from its previous owners, SourceForge and it also includes a directory of Linux software and hardware. Much like Linux itself, Linux. com plans to rely on the community to create and drive the content, the Linux Foundation hosts a Linux video forum where users, developers and vendors can create and share Linux video tutorials. It also includes videos from recent Linux Foundation events, as well as other industry forums and it is the home for the annual Linux Foundation Video Contest. The Linux Foundation plans to add commissioned series of Linux video tutorials on Linux. com in the months ahead, the Linux Developer Network is an online community for Linux application developers and independent software vendors who want to start or continue to develop applications for the Linux platform. The Linux Developer Networks goal is to empower developers to target the Linux platform, one of the ways the Linux Developer Network helps developers accomplish this is to help them build portable Linux applications. The Linux Developer Network also gives developers tools to create the best Linux apps possible, the Linux Foundation Training Program features instructors and content straight from the leaders of the Linux developer community
5.
Operating system
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An operating system is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. All computer programs, excluding firmware, require a system to function. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer – from cellular phones, the dominant desktop operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 83. 3%. MacOS by Apple Inc. is in place, and the varieties of Linux is in third position. Linux distributions are dominant in the server and supercomputing sectors, other specialized classes of operating systems, such as embedded and real-time systems, exist for many applications. A single-tasking system can run one program at a time. Multi-tasking may be characterized in preemptive and co-operative types, in preemptive multitasking, the operating system slices the CPU time and dedicates a slot to each of the programs. Unix-like operating systems, e. g. Solaris, Linux, cooperative multitasking is achieved by relying on each process to provide time to the other processes in a defined manner. 16-bit versions of Microsoft Windows used cooperative multi-tasking, 32-bit versions of both Windows NT and Win9x, used preemptive multi-tasking. Single-user operating systems have no facilities to distinguish users, but may allow multiple programs to run in tandem, a distributed operating system manages a group of distinct computers and makes them appear to be a single computer. The development of networked computers that could be linked and communicate with each other gave rise to distributed computing, distributed computations are carried out on more than one machine. When computers in a work in cooperation, they form a distributed system. The technique is used both in virtualization and cloud computing management, and is common in large server warehouses, embedded operating systems are designed to be used in embedded computer systems. They are designed to operate on small machines like PDAs with less autonomy and they are able to operate with a limited number of resources. They are very compact and extremely efficient by design, Windows CE and Minix 3 are some examples of embedded operating systems. A real-time operating system is a system that guarantees to process events or data by a specific moment in time. A real-time operating system may be single- or multi-tasking, but when multitasking, early computers were built to perform a series of single tasks, like a calculator. Basic operating system features were developed in the 1950s, such as resident monitor functions that could run different programs in succession to speed up processing
6.
Debian
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The Debian Project was first announced in 1993 by Ian Murdock, Debian 0.01 was released on September 15,1993, and the first stable release was made in 1996. The Debian stable release branch is one of the most popular for personal computers and network servers, new distributions are updated continually, and the next candidate is released after a time-based freeze. As one of the earliest Operating Systems based on the Linux kernel and this decision drew the attention and support of the Free Software Foundation, which sponsored the project for one year from November 1994 to November 1995. Upon the ending of the sponsorship, the Debian Project formed the non-profit organisation Software in the Public Interest, while Debians main port, Debian GNU/Linux, uses the Linux kernel, other ports exist based on BSD kernels and the HURD microkernel. All use the GNU userland and the GNU C library, Debian has access to online repositories that contain over 50,000 software packages making it one of the largest software compilations. Debian officially contains only free software, but non-free software can be downloaded from the Debian repositories, Debian includes popular free programs such as LibreOffice, Firefox web browser, Evolution mail, K3b disc burner, VLC media player, GIMP image editor, and Evince document viewer. Debian is a choice for web servers. Debian supports Linux officially, offered kFreeBSD for version 7 but not 8, GNU/kFreeBSD was released as a technology preview for IA-32 and x86-64 architectures, and lacked the amount of software available in Debians Linux distribution. Official support for kFreeBSD was removed for version 8, which did not provide a kFreeBSD-based distribution, several flavors of the Linux kernel exist for each port. For example, the port has flavors for IA-32 PCs supporting Physical Address Extension and real-time computing, for older PCs. The Linux kernel does not officially contain firmware without sources, although such firmware is available in non-free packages, Debian offers DVD and CD images for installation that can be downloaded using BitTorrent or jigdo. Physical disks can also be bought from retailers, Debian offers different network installation methods. A minimal install of Debian is available via the netinst CD, whereby Debian is installed with just a base, another option is to boot the installer from the network. Installation images are hybrid on some architectures and can be used to create a bootable USB drive, the default bootstrap loader is GNU GRUB version 2, though the package name is simply grub, while version 1 was renamed to grub-legacy. This conflicts with e. g. Fedora, where grub version 2 is named grub2, the default desktop may be chosen from the DVD boot menu among GNOME, KDE Software Compilation, Xfce and LXDE, and from special disc 1 CDs. Debian offers CD images specifically built for GNOME, KDE Software Compilation, Xfce, MATE is officially supported, while Cinnamon support was added with Debian 8.0 Jessie. Less common window managers such as Enlightenment, Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, Window Maker, the default desktop environment of version 7.0 Wheezy was temporarily switched to Xfce, because GNOME3 did not fit on the first CD of the set. The default for the version 8.0 Jessie was changed again to Xfce in November 2013, Debian releases live install images for CDs, DVDs and USB thumb drives, for IA-32 and x86-64 architectures, and with a choice of desktop environments
7.
International Organization for Standardization
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The International Organization for Standardization is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on 23 February 1947, the organization promotes worldwide proprietary and it is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and as of March 2017 works in 162 countries. It was one of the first organizations granted general consultative status with the United Nations Economic, ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, is an independent, non-governmental organization, the members of which are the standards organizations of the 162 member countries. It is the worlds largest developer of international standards and facilitates world trade by providing common standards between nations. Nearly twenty thousand standards have been set covering everything from manufactured products and technology to food safety, use of the standards aids in the creation of products and services that are safe, reliable and of good quality. The standards help businesses increase productivity while minimizing errors and waste, by enabling products from different markets to be directly compared, they facilitate companies in entering new markets and assist in the development of global trade on a fair basis. The standards also serve to safeguard consumers and the end-users of products and services, the three official languages of the ISO are English, French, and Russian. The name of the organization in French is Organisation internationale de normalisation, according to the ISO, as its name in different languages would have different abbreviations, the organization adopted ISO as its abbreviated name in reference to the Greek word isos. However, during the meetings of the new organization, this Greek word was not invoked. Both the name ISO and the logo are registered trademarks, the organization today known as ISO began in 1926 as the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations. ISO is an organization whose members are recognized authorities on standards. Members meet annually at a General Assembly to discuss ISOs strategic objectives, the organization is coordinated by a Central Secretariat based in Geneva. A Council with a membership of 20 member bodies provides guidance and governance. The Technical Management Board is responsible for over 250 technical committees, ISO has formed joint committees with the International Electrotechnical Commission to develop standards and terminology in the areas of electrical and electronic related technologies. Information technology ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 was created in 1987 to evelop, maintain, ISO has three membership categories, Member bodies are national bodies considered the most representative standards body in each country. These are the members of ISO that have voting rights. Correspondent members are countries that do not have their own standards organization and these members are informed about ISOs work, but do not participate in standards promulgation. Subscriber members are countries with small economies and they pay reduced membership fees, but can follow the development of standards
8.
X86-64
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X86-64 is the 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set. It supports vastly larger amounts of memory and physical memory than is possible on its 32-bit predecessors. X86-64 also provides 64-bit general-purpose registers and numerous other enhancements and it is fully backward compatible with 16-bit and 32-bit x86 code. The original specification, created by AMD and released in 2000, has been implemented by AMD, Intel, the AMD K8 processor was the first to implement the architecture, this was the first significant addition to the x86 architecture designed by a company other than Intel. Intel was forced to suit and introduced a modified NetBurst family which was fully software-compatible with AMDs design. VIA Technologies introduced x86-64 in their VIA Isaiah architecture, with the VIA Nano, the x86-64 specification is distinct from the Intel Itanium architecture, which is not compatible on the native instruction set level with the x86 architecture. AMD64 was created as an alternative to the radically different IA-64 architecture, the first AMD64-based processor, the Opteron, was released in April 2003. AMDs processors implementing the AMD64 architecture include Opteron, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon II, Turion 64, Turion 64 X2, Sempron, Phenom, Phenom II, FX, Fusion and Ryzen. The primary defining characteristic of AMD64 is the availability of 64-bit general-purpose processor registers, 64-bit integer arithmetic and logical operations, the designers took the opportunity to make other improvements as well. Some of the most significant changes are described below, pushes and pops on the stack default to 8-byte strides, and pointers are 8 bytes wide. Additional registers In addition to increasing the size of the general-purpose registers, AMD64 still has fewer registers than many common RISC instruction sets or VLIW-like machines such as the IA-64. However, an AMD64 implementation may have far more internal registers than the number of architectural registers exposed by the instruction set, additional XMM registers Similarly, the number of 128-bit XMM registers is also increased from 8 to 16. Larger virtual address space The AMD64 architecture defines a 64-bit virtual address format and this allows up to 256 TB of virtual address space. The architecture definition allows this limit to be raised in future implementations to the full 64 bits and this is compared to just 4 GB for the x86. This means that very large files can be operated on by mapping the entire file into the address space, rather than having to map regions of the file into. Larger physical address space The original implementation of the AMD64 architecture implemented 40-bit physical addresses, current implementations of the AMD64 architecture extend this to 48-bit physical addresses and therefore can address up to 256 TB of RAM. The architecture permits extending this to 52 bits in the future, for comparison, 32-bit x86 processors are limited to 64 GB of RAM in Physical Address Extension mode, or 4 GB of RAM without PAE mode. Any implementation therefore allows the physical address limit as under long mode
9.
Red Hat
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Red Hat, Inc. is an American multinational software company providing open-source software products to the enterprise community. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. Red Hat has become associated to an extent with its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat also offers Red Hat Virtualization, a virtualization product. Red Hat provides storage, operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, and support, training, Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects. It has acquired several proprietary software product codebases through corporate mergers, as of March 2016, Red Hat is the second largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel version 4.5 after Intel. In 1993, Bob Young incorporated the ACC Corporation, a business that sold Linux. In 1994, Marc Ewing created his own Linux distribution, which he named Red Hat Linux, Ewing released the software in October, and it became known as the Halloween release. Young bought Ewings business in 1995, and the two merged to become Red Hat Software, with Young serving as executive officer. Red Hat went public on August 11,1999, achieving the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street, matthew Szulik succeeded Bob Young as CEO in December of that year. Bob Young went on to found the print on demand and self-publishing company. Before its IPO, Red Hat had received funding from Joyce Young. When Red Hat went public, she cashed in enough stock to recoup her initial investment, then left the remaining stock to linger, for fun. Her return on investment was so great that, by January 2000 she was a millionaire, on November 15,1999, Red Hat acquired Cygnus Solutions. Cygnus provided commercial support for software and housed maintainers of GNU software products such as the GNU Debugger. One of the founders of Cygnus, Michael Tiemann, became the technical officer of Red Hat. Later Red Hat acquired WireSpeed, C2Net and Hells Kitchen Systems, in February 2000, InfoWorld awarded Red Hat its fourth consecutive Operating System Product of the Year award for Red Hat Linux 6.1. Red Hat acquired Planning Technologies, Inc in 2001 and AOLs iPlanet directory, Red Hat moved its headquarters from Durham to North Carolina State Universitys Centennial Campus in Raleigh, North Carolina in February 2002
