Quick question: What is more than 60 years old, but still spry enough to beat the best mid-range clusters at big data? If your answer was the mainframe, then you're correct.

IBM says it will offer Linux supporters the next best thing starting this week: free access to one of the computing giant's powerful mainframe sytems.

The IBM z17 mainframe can process 450 billion AI inferences a day, a significant step up from what its predecessor could.