[Info-vax] What does VMS get used for, these days?

[Robert Carleton]

On Friday, October 14, 2022 at 8:35:06 PM UTC-5, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> John Dallman <j... at cix.co.uk> wrote: 
> > 
> >My employers used it as a software development system, producing 
> >mathematical modelling code for VMS, plus a wide range of other platforms. 
> >Demand for the code on VMS shrank in the 1990s, and it became expensive 
> >compared to doing development on Windows. We had dropped it by the year 
> >2000. We'd resume support if there was significant demand for it on 
> >x86-64, which is why I joined this newsgroup.
> In the eighties we did a lot of this, and we did this in spite of VMS being 
> badly-suited for scientific computing. We did it because the DEC hardware 
> was the fastest for the dollar and the DEC fortran compiler was the best and 
> most advanced. But we spent a lot of time fighting features in VMS that were 
> advantageous in a commercial data processing environment. 
> 
> When Sun machines started having better floating point performance for the 
> buck, we dropped VMS quickly as a scientific programming environment in 
> favor of SunOS which was sort of unreliable and worse in a lot of ways 
> but nobody cared because the machines were fast.
> >What do you use VMS for in the 2020s?
> Large scale data processing applications that benefit from the heavyweight 
> filesystems but aren't totally transaction-based. 
> --scott 
> 
> -- 
> "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

I work in an environment where there's lots of scientific computing on the Linux platform. One of the things about it, is that getting compute time is very competitive, and our users/coders game the batch systems to gain an advantage in getting their jobs to run. We can't use the stock Linux batch systems (at, batch, atd, cron, and friends) for that work, though the system administrators probably use those for some of what they do. We have to use add-on batch systems for controlling those jobs.

I'm not familiar with the VMS batch facilities yet (I'm a Linux/BSD jockey), but I've heard that they are pretty advanced. Perhaps that would provide an advantage, at least when there is a lot of competition for compute resources.