What is a mainframe used for?

Answer 1

Mainframe is used in business where the data to be processed is too huge and has to be processed too many times and may require too much CPU cycles where the else of the computers may flunk.

Mainframes are very similar too supercomputers ahich can process huge number of transactions in small amout of time . but the only diff between supercomputer and mainframes is supercomputers are used to calculate and process complex algorithms say which has so many integration and diffretiation and lotssa calculus steps where as mainframes are used to handle simple business related calculations like addition and subtraction kinda things .

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First understand that any company that has a mainframe is pretty big--an insurance company, a carmaker, someone like that. They will use it for several things:

It's got the company's databases on it. One of the databases might be a list of customers: it will list the customers and usually all the things they've ordered over a certain time period. You can do this with a PC, but mainframe databases can get much larger and they've got more features.

It's set up to share resources. All the company's printers will be hooked to it. When you send a print job to it, you can tell it to print only to one printer, or to any printer that's available and capable of taking the job.

These days corporate e-mail will go into the mainframe.

And sometimes you run programs on mainframes, but that was mostly done back before PCs got so prevalent. When all you had was a "dumb terminal" like an IBM 3278, the mainframe had to store plus process your data; today a lot of processing is done out on the PC and completed data is sent back to the big iron.

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Simpler, a mainframe is only a way to designate the main node withing an array of computers linked by networking. In other words, he the big kahuna!, but it doesint mean he's the most powerful!.

Mainframe = Node 1 = Computer #1 = Big kahuna

Jumper!

Answer 2

It is used for the same purpose as in any other computer.