z/Architects Gone Wild - A Look at Unusual z/Architecture Instructions

This presentation will look at some unusual instructions of z/Architecture and explain their use in an accessible way. It will also give an additional technical and historical perspective. The instructions covered are: Checksum, Update Tree, Compare and Form Codeword, Perform Locked Operation, Load Pair Disjoint, Population Count, Store Clock Fast, Monitor Call, Translate One/Two to One/Two, Search String Unicode, Convert Unicode. The author is a young mainframer, and selected instructions whose purpose was not very clear to himself at the beginning of his mainframe career.

Tracks: zNextGen