IBM, like other major companies, is developing large compute servers. These servers run typically various applications supported on a variety of different operating systems. To support all the user scenarios the systems consist of a hardware layer and a system software layer, which is hidden from the application or operating system. The hardware consists of a set of chips where some are unique for a given series of compute server. The system software, also called firmware, can be viewed as an extension of the hardware, to enable additional features and to manage those complex systems.
展开▼
