Inside The Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems - IEEE Spectrum

6/27/22, 5:05 PM Inside the Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems - IEEE Spectrum
IEEE.ORG SIGN IN JOIN IEEE
AD VE RTI SE ME NT
FEATURE COMPUTING
INSIDE THE
HIDDEN
WORLD OF
LEGACY IT
SYSTEMS
How and why we spend trillions to keep old software going
https://spectrum.ieee.org/inside-hidden-world-legacy-it-systems 1/31
BY ROBERT N. CHARETTE
28 AUG 2020 17 MIN READ

  
PHOTO: ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES
“F
IX THE DAMN UNEMPLOYMENT SYSTEM!"
This past spring, tens of millions of Americans lost

their jobs due to lockdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the
SARS-CoV-2 virus. And untold numbers of the newly jobless
waited weeks for their unemployment benefit claims to be
processed, while others anxiously watched their bank accounts
for an extra US $600 weekly payment from the federal
government.
Delays in processing unemployment claims in 19 states—

e ays
6/27/22, 5:05 PM
p ocess g u Inside
e thepHidden
oy World
e oftLegacy
c a IT Systems
s - IEEE
9 Spectrum
states
Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas,
Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon,
Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and
Wisconsin—are attributed to problems with antiquated and
incompatible state and federal unemployment IT systems. Most
of those systems date from the 1980s, and some go back even
further.
Things were so bad in New Jersey that Governor Phil Murphy

pleaded in a press conference for volunteer COBOL
programmers to step up to fix the state's Disability Automated
Benefits System. A clearly exasperated Murphy said that when
the pandemic passed, there would be a post mortem focused on
the question of “how the heck did we get here when we literally
needed cobalt [sic] programmers?"
Similar problems have emerged at the federal level. As part of

the federal government's pandemic relief plan, eligible U.S.
taxpayers were to receive $1,200 payments from the Internal
Revenue Service. However, it took up to 20 weeks to send out
all the payments because the IRS computer systems are even
older than the states' unemployment systems, some dating back
almost 60 years.
As the legendary investor Warren Buffett once said, “It's only

when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming
naked." The pandemic has acted as a powerful outgoing tide
that has exposed government's dependence on aging legacy IT
systems.
AD VE RTI SE ME NT
Atitude e Femilidade | Vivara

Exalte o Poder da Sua Feminilidade
e Expresse Sua Personalidade com
a Coleção de Vivara.
But governments aren't the only ones struggling under the

weight of antiquated IT. It is equally easy to find airlines, banks,
insurance companies, and other commercial entities that
continue to rely on old IT, contending with software or
hardware that is no longer supported by the supplier or has
defects that are too costly to repair. These systems are prone to
outages and errors, vulnerable to cyberintrusions, and
progressively more expensive and difficult to maintain.
Since 2010, corporations and governments worldwide have

spent an estimated $35 trillion on IT products and services. Of
this amount, about three-quarters went toward operating and
maintaining existing IT systems. And at least $2.5 trillion was
spent on trying to replace legacy IT systems, of which some
$720 billion was wasted on failed replacement efforts.
But it's astonishing how seldom people notice these IT systems,

even with companies and public institutions spending hundreds
of billions of dollars every year on them. From the time we get
up until we go to bed we interact often unknowingly with -
up until we go to bed, we interact, often unknowingly, with
dozens of IT systems. Our voice-activated digital assistants read
the headlines to us before we hop into our cars loaded with
embedded processors, some of which help us drive, others of
which entertain us as we guzzle coffee brewed by our own
robotic baristas. Infrastructure like wastewater treatment
plants, power grids, air traffic control, telecommunications
services, and government administration depends on hundreds
of thousands of unseen IT systems that form another, hidden
infrastructure. Commercial organizations rely on IT systems to
manage payroll, order supplies, and approve cashless sales, to
name but three of thousands of automated tasks necessary to
the smooth functioning of a modern economy. Though these
systems run practically every aspect of our lives, we don't give
them a second thought because, for the most part, they
function. It doesn't even occur to us that IT is something that
needs constant attention to be kept in working order.
In his landmark study The Shock of the Old: Technology and

Global History Since 1900 (Oxford University Press, 2007),
British historian David Edgerton claims that although
maintenance and repair are central to our relationship with
technology, they are “matters we would rather not think about."
As a result, technology maintenance “has lived in a twilight
world, hardly visible in the formal accounts societies make of
themselves."
Indeed, the very invisibility of legacy IT is a kind of testament to

how successful these systems are. Except, of course, when
they're not.
AD VE RTI SE ME NT
There's no formal definition of “legacy system," but it's

commonly understood to mean a critical system that is out of
date in some way. It may be unable to support future business
operations; the vendors that supplied the application, operating
system, or hardware may no longer be in business or support
their products; the system architecture may be fragile or
complex and therefore unsuitable for upgrades or fixes; or the
finer details of how the system works are no longer understood.
To modernize a computing system or not is a question that

bedevils nearly every organization. Given the many problems
caused by legacy IT systems, you'd think that modernization
would be a no-brainer. But that decision isn't nearly as
straightforward as it appears. Some legacy IT systems end up
that way because they work just fine over a long period. Others
stagger along because the organization either doesn't want to or
can't afford to take on the cost and risk associated with
modernization.
Worldwide IT Spending since 2010

THIS DATA IS DERIVED FROM COMMERCIAL SOURCES AND IS A
ROUGH ESTIMATE. OTHER SOURCES INDICATE THAT US $35
TRILLION IS A SIGNIFICANT UNDERESTIMATE BECAUSE LABOR

COSTS ARE NOT TOTALLY ACCOUNTED FOR.
Source: Robert N. Charette, based on data from Gartner and Apptio
Obviously, a legacy system that's critical to day-to-day

operations cannot be replaced or enhanced without major
disruption. And so even though that system contributes
mightily to the organization's operations management tends to 7/31
https://spectrum.ieee.org/inside-hidden-world-legacy-it-systems
mightily to the organization s operations, management tends to
ignore it and defer modernization. On most days, nothing goes
catastrophically wrong, and so the legacy system remains in
place.
This “kick the can" approach is understandable. Most IT

systems, whether new or modernized, are expensive affairs that
go live late and over budget, assuming they don't fail partially or
completely. These situations are not career-enhancing
experiences, as many former chief information officers and
program managers can attest. Therefore, once an IT system is
finally operating reliably, there's little motivation to plan for its
eventual retirement.
What management does demand, however, is for any new IT

system to provide a return on investment and to cost as little as
possible for as long as possible. Such demands often lead to
years of underinvestment in routine maintenance. Of course,
those same executives who approved the investment in the new
system probably won't be with the organization a decade later,
when that system has legacy status.
Similarly, the developers of the system, who understand in

detail how it operates and what its limitations are, may well
have moved on to other projects or organizations. For especially
long-lived IT systems, most of the developers have likely
retired. Over time, the system becomes part of the routine of its
users' daily life, like the office elevator. So long as it works, no
one pays much attention to it, and eventually it recedes into the
organization's operational shadows.
Thus does an IT system quietly age into legacy status.
Millions of people every month experience the frustrations

and inconveniences of decrepit legacy IT.
U.K. bank customers know this frustration only too well.

According to the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, the nation's
banks reported nearly 600 IT operational and security incidents
between October 2017 and September 2018, an increase of 187
percent from a year earlier. Government regulators point to the
banks' reliance on decades-old IT systems as a recurring cause
for the incidents.
Airline passengers are equally exasperated. Over the past

several years, U.S. air carriers have experienced on average
nearly one IT-related outage per month, many of them
attributable to legacy IT. Some have lasted days and caused the
delay or cancellation of thousands of flights.
Poorly maintained legacy IT systems are also prone to

cybersecurity breaches. At the credit reporting agency Equifax,
the complexity of its legacy systems contributed to a failure to
patch a critical vulnerability in the company's Automated
Consumer Interview System, a custom-built portal developed in
the 1970s to handle consumer disputes. This failure led, in 2017,
to the loss of 146 million individuals' sensitive personal
information.
Aging IT systems also open the door to crippling ransomware

attacks. In this type of attack, a cyberintruder hacks into an IT
system and encrypts all of the system data until a ransom is
syste
6/27/22, 5:05 PM
a d e c ypts a Inside
o thet Hidden
e syste data u t a a so
World of Legacy IT Systems - IEEE Spectrum
s
paid. In the past two years, ransomware attacks have been
launched against the cities of Atlanta and Baltimore as well as
the Florida municipalities of Riviera Beach and Lake City. The
latter two agreed to pay their attackers $600,000 and $500,000,
respectively. Dozens of state and local governments, as well as
school systems and hospitals, have experienced ransomware
attacks.
Even if they don't suffer an embarrassing and costly failure,

organizations still have to contend with the steadily climbing
operational and maintenance costs of legacy IT. For instance, a
recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that
of the $90 billion the U.S. government spent on IT in fiscal year
2019, nearly 80 percent went toward operation and
maintenance of existing systems. Furthermore, of the 7,000
federal IT investments the GAO examined in detail, it found that
5,233 allocated all their funding to operation and maintenance,
leaving no monies to modernize. From fiscal year 2010 to 2017,
the amount spent on IT modernization dropped by $7.3 billion,
while operation and maintenance spending rose by 9 percent.
Tony Salvaggio, founder and CEO of CAI, an international firm
that specializes in supporting IT systems for government and
commercial firms, notes that ever-growing IT legacy costs will
continue to eat government's IT modernization “seed corn."
While not all operational and maintenance costs can be

attributed to legacy IT, the GAO noted that the rise in spending
is likely due to supporting obsolete computing hardware—for
example, two-thirds of the Internal Revenue Service's hardware
is beyond its useful life as well as “maintaining applications
is beyond its useful life—as well as maintaining applications
and systems that use older programming languages, since
programmers knowledgeable in these older languages are
becoming increasingly rare and thus more expensive."
U.S. Federal government spending on IT products and

services, 2019
THE U.S. OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET BREAKS IT
INVESTMENT COSTS INTO TWO CATEGORIES: (1) OPERATION AND
MAINTENANCE AND (2) DEVELOPMENT, MODERNIZATION, AND
ENHANCEMENT.
Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-19-471
Take COBOL, a programming language that dates to 1959.

Computer science departments stopped teaching COBOL some
decades ago. And yet the U.S. Social Security
Administrationreportedly still runs some 60 million lines of
COBOL. The IRS has nearly as much COBOL programming,
along with 20 million lines of assembly code. And, according to
a 2016 GAO report, the departments of Commerce, Defense,
Treasury, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs are
still “using 1980s and 1990s Microsoft operating systems that
stopped being supported by the vendor more than a decade
ago."
Given the vast amount of outdated software that's still in use,

the cost of maintaining it will likely keep climbing not only for
government, but for commercial organizations, too.
The first step in fixing a massive problem is to admit you have

one. At least some governments and companies are finally
starting to do just that. In December 2017, for example,
President Trump signed the Modernizing Government
Technology Act into law. It allows federal agencies and
departments to apply for funds from a $150 million Technology
Modernization Fund to accelerate the modernization of their IT
systems. The Congressional Budget Office originally indicated
the need was closer to $1.8 billion per year, but politicians'
concerns over whether the money would be well spent resulted
in a significant reduction in funding.
Part of the modernization push by governments in the United

States and abroad has been to provide more effective

administrative controls, increase the reliability and speed of
delivering benefits, and improve customer service. In the
commercial sector, by contrast, IT modernization is being
driven more by competitive pressures and the availability of
newer computing technologies like cloud computing and
machine learning.
“Everyone understands now that IT drives organization

innovation," Salvaggio told IEEE Spectrum. He believes that the
capabilities these new technologies will create over the next few
years are “going to blow up 30 to 40 percent of [existing]
business models." Companies saddled with legacy IT systems
won't be able to compete on the expected rapid delivery of
improved features or customer service, and therefore “are going
to find themselves forced into a box canyon, unable to get out,"
Salvaggio says.
This is already happening in the banking industry. Existing

firms are having a difficult time competing with new businesses
that are spending most of their IT budgets on creating new
offerings instead of supporting legacy systems. For example,
Starling Bank in the United Kingdom, which began operations
in 2014, offers only mobile banking. It uses Amazon Web
Services to host its services and spent a mere £18 million ($24
million) to create its infrastructure. In comparison, the U.K.'s
TSB bank, a traditional full-service bank founded in 1810, spent
£417 million ($546 million) moving to a new banking platform
in 2018.
Starling maintains all its own code and does an average of one
software release per day. It can do this because it doesn't have
the intricate connections to myriad legacy IT systems, where
every new software release carries a measurable risk of
operational failure, according to the U.K.'s bank regulators.
Simpler systems mean fewer and shorter IT-related outages.
Starling has had only one major outage since it opened, whereas
each of the three largest U.K. banks has had at least a dozen
apiece over the same period.
The Multilayers of the U.S. Navy's Legacy Pay and Personnel

System
THIS HODGEPODGE OF IT SYSTEMS GOES BACK TO THE EARLY
1980S, WHEN THE NAVY FOLLOWED A FAILED 1960S-ERA IT-
MODERNIZATION EFFORT WITH ANOTHER NOT ENTIRELY
SUCCESSFUL PROJECT TO CONSOLIDATE ITS MULTIPLE PAY AND
PERSONNEL SYSTEMS. YET A THIRD MODERNIZATION EFFORT
BEGAN IN THE LATE 1990S. IT TOO WAS ONLY PARTIALLY
SUCCESSFUL, LEADING TO THE LATEST MODERNIZATION EFFORT.
Source: U.S. Naval Enterprise Networks Program Office Presentation, 6 August

2018
Modernization creates its own problems. Take the migration of

legacy data to a new system. When TSB moved to its new IT
platform in 2018, some 1.9 million online and mobile customers
discovered they were locked out of their accounts for nearly two
weeks. And modernizing one legacy system often means having
to upgrade other interconnecting systems, which may also be
legacy. At the IRS, for instance, the original master tax file
systems installed in the 1960s have become buried under layers
of more modern, interconnected systems, each of which made it
harder to replace the preceding system. The agency has been
trying to modernize its interconnected legacy tax systems since
1968 at a cumulative cost of at least $20 billion in today's
money, so far with very little success. It plans to spend up to
another $2.7 billion on modernization over the next five years.
Another common issue is that legacy systems have duplicate

functions. The U.S. Navy is in the process of installing its $167
million Navy Pay and Personnel system, which aims to
consolidate 223 applications residing in 55 separate IT systems,
including 10 that are more than 30 years old and a few that are
more than 50 years old. The disparate systems used 21
programming languages executing on nine operating systems
programming languages, executing on nine operating systems
ranging across 73 data centers and networks.
Such massive duplication and data silos sound ridiculous, but

they are shockingly common. Here's one way it often happens:
The government issues a new mandate that includes a
requirement for some type of automation, and the policy comes
with fresh funding to implement it. Rather than upgrade an
existing system, which would be disruptive, the department or
agency finds it easier to just create a new IT system, even if
some or most of the new system duplicates what the existing
system is doing. The result is that different units within the
same organization end up deploying IT systems with
overlapping functions.
“The shortage of thinking about systems engineering" along

with the lack of coordinating IT developments to avoid
duplication have long plagued government and corporations
alike, Salvaggio says.
Top 10 U.S. Federal Systems Most In Need of Modernization

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE ANALYZED 65
FEDERAL LEGACY SYSTEMS IN NEED OF MODERNIZATION THAT 24
AGENCIES HAD IDENTIFIED. OF THESE, THE GAO IDENTIFIED
10 THAT MOST REQUIRE MODERNIZATION, BASED ON ATTRIBUTES
SUCH AS AGE, CRITICALITY, AND RISK.
Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-19-471
The best way to deal with legacy IT is to never let IT become

legacy. Growing recognition of legacy IT systems' many costs
has sparked a rethinking of the role of software maintenance.
One new approach was recently articulated in Software Is Never
Done, a May 2019 report from the U.S. Defense Innovation
Board. It argues that software should be viewed “as an enduring
capability that must be supported and continuously improved
throughout its life cycle." This includes being able to test,
integrate, and deliver improvements to software systems within
short periods of time and on an ongoing basis.
Here's what that means in practice. Currently, software

development, operations, and support are considered separate
activities. But if you fuse those activities into a single integrated
activity—employing what is called DevOps—the operational
system is then always “under development," continuously and
incrementally being improved, tested, and deployed, sometimes
many times a day.
DevOps is just one way to keep core IT systems from turning

into legacy systems. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency has been exploring another, potentially more
effective way, recognizing the longevity of IT systems once
implemented.
Since 2015, DARPA has funded research aimed at making

software that will be viable for more than 100 years. The
Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS)
program is trying to figure out how to build “long-lived software
systems that can dynamically adapt to changes in the resources
they depend upon and environments in which they operate,"

according to program manager S
andeep Neema.
Creating such timeless systems will require a “start from

scratch" approach to software design that doesn't make
assumptions about how an IT system should be designed,
coded, or maintained. That will entail identifying the logical
(libraries, data formats, structures) and physical resources
(processing, storage, energy) a software program needs for
execution. Such analyses could use advanced AI techniques that
discover and make visible an application's operations and
interactions with other applications and systems. By doing so,
changes to resources or interactions with other systems, which
account for many system failures or inefficient operations, can
be actively managed before problems occur. Developers will
also need to create a capability, again possibly using AI, to
monitor and repair all elements of the execution environment in
which the application resides.
The goal is to be able to update or upgrade applications without

the need for extensive intervention by a human programmer,
Neema told Spectrum, thereby “buying down the cost of
maintenance."
The BRASS program has funded nine projects, each of which

represents different aspects of what a resource-adaptive
software system will need to do. Some of the projects involve
UAVs, mobile robots, and high-performance computing. The
final results of the effort are expected later this year, when the
technologies will be released to open-source repositories,
industry, and the Defense Department.
Some Major Legacy System Debacles of The Last Decade

HERE IS A SMALL SAMPLING OF THE MOST NOTABLE
MODERNIZATION FAILURES, OUTAGES, AND CYBERSECURITY
BREACHES INVOLVING LEGACY SYSTEMS BEGINNING IN 2010, AS
WELL AS INSTANCES WHERE LEGACY SYSTEMS HAVE BEEN
REPLACED BUT WHOSE SUBSEQUENT OPERATIONS HAVE BEEN
PROBLEMATIC.
COLOR KEY
Legacy System Modernization Failures
Legacy System Replaced, But Subsequent Operational Difficulties
Outage blamed on legacy IT system
Legacy System Contributes to Cybersecurity Breach
YEAR ORGANIZATION
2010 Department of Defense
2010 National Australia Bank
2011–2013 California Public Employees' Retirement System (Cal
2012 California Judiciary
2012 U.S. Air Force
2012 U.K. Royal Bank of Scotland Group
2013 Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry
2014–2016 Canada's Ontario Ministry of Community and Social S
2015 Deutsche Post DHL
2015 U.S. Office of Personnel Management
2016 Southwest Airlines
2016–2018 Rhode Island Department of Human Services
2016–present Public Services and Procurement Canada
2017 U.K. National Health Service

2018 Lidl
2018 U.S. Coast Guard
2018 City of Atlanta, Georgia
2018–2019 U.K. TSB Bank
COLOR KEY
Legacy System Modernization Failures
Legacy System Replaced, But Subsequent Operational Difficulties
Outage blamed on legacy IT system
Legacy System Contributes to Cybersecurity Breach
Neema says no one should expect BRASS to deliver “a general-

purpose software repair capability." A more realistic outcome is
an approach that can work within specific data, software, and
system parameters to help the maintainers who oversee those
systems to become more efficient and effective. He of course
hopes that private companies and other government
organizations will build on the BRASS program's results.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the debilitating

consequences of relying on antiquated IT systems for essential
services. Unfortunately, that dependence, along with legacy IT's
enormous and increasing costs, will still be with us long after
the pandemic has ended. For the U.S. government alone, even a
concerted and well-executed effort would take decades to
replace the thousands of existing legacy systems. Over that
time, current IT systems will also become legacy and
themselves require replacement. Given the budgetary impacts
f th d i l
https://spectrum.ieee.org/inside-hidden-world-legacy-it-systems f l t 21/31
of the pandemic, even less money for legacy system

modernization may be available in the future across all
government sectors.
The problems associated with legacy systems will only worsen

as the Internet of Things, with its billions of interconnected
computing devices, matures. These devices are already being
connected to legacy IT, which will make it even more difficult to
replace and modernize those systems. And eventually the IoT
devices will become legacy. Just as with legacy systems today,
those devices likely won't be replaced as long as they continue
to work, even if they are no longer supported. The potential
cybersecurity risk of vast numbers of obsolete but still
operating IoT devices is a huge unknown. Already, many IoT
devices have been deployed without basic cybersecurity built
into them, and this shortsightedness is taking a toll.
Cybersecurity concerns compelled the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration to recall implantable pacemakers and insulin
pumps and the National Security Agency to warn about IoT-
enabled smart furniture, among other things of the Internet.
Now imagine a not-too-distant future where hundreds of

millions or even billions of legacy IoT devices are deeply
embedded into government and commercial offices, schools,
hospitals, factories, homes, and even people. Further imagine
that their cybersecurity or technical flaws are not being fixed
and remain connected to legacy IT systems that themselves are
barely supported. In such a world, the pervasive dependence
upon increasing numbers of interconnected, obsolete systems
will have created something far grimmer and murkier than
Edgerton's twilight world.
This article appears in the September 2020 print issue as “The

Hidden World of Legacy IT."
About the Author
PHOTO: MAURA CHARETTE
As a risk consultant for businesses and a slew of three-lettered U.S. government agencies,
Contributing Editor Robert N. Charette has seen more than his share of languishing legacy
IT systems. As a civilian, he's also been a casualty of a legacy system gone berserk. A few
years ago, his bank's IT system, which he later found out was being upgraded, made an
error that was most definitely not in his favor.
He'd gone to an ATM to withdraw some weekend cash. The machine told him that his
account was overdrawn. Puzzled, because he knew he had sufficient funds in his account
to cover the withdrawal, he had to wait until Monday to contact the bank for an
explanation. When he called, the customer service representative insisted that he was
indeed overdrawn. This was an understatement, considering that the size of the alleged
overdraft might have caused a person less versed in software debacles to have a stroke.
“ 'You know, you're overdrawn by [US] $1,229,200,' " Charette recalls being told. “I was like,
well, that's interesting, because I don't have that much money in my bank account."
The customer service rep then acknowledged it could be an error caused by a computer
glitch during a recent systems upgrade. Two days later he received the letter pictured
above from his bank, apparently triggered by a check he had written for $55.80. Charette
notes that it wasn't the million-dollar-plus overdraft that triggered the letter, just that last
double-nickel drop in the bucket.
The bank never did send a letter apologizing for the inconvenience or explaining the
problem, which he believes likely affected other customers. And like so many of the failed
legacy-system upgrades—some costing billions, which Charette describes here—it never
made the news, either.
MORE FROM SPECTRUM
The Problem of Old Code and Older Coders - IEEE Spectrum

›
TAGS
IT SOFTWARE IT SECURITY SOFTWARE FAILURE GOVERNMENT IT IT SYSTEMS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged

international authority on information technology and systems risk management. See
full bio →
READER RESPONSES SORT BY POPULAR
Add comment...
PUBLISH
READ ALSO
NEWS TELECOMMUNICATIONS
New Transceiver Receives Power and Data

Simultaneously
3 HOURS AGO 3 MIN READ
FEATURE ENERGY
This Dutch City Is Road-Testing Vehicle-to-

Grid Tech
7 HOURS AGO 10 MIN READ
NEWS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Measuring AI’s Carbon Footprint

26 JUN 2022 3 MIN READ
NEWS COMPUTING
The Beating Heart of the World’s First Exascale

Supercomputer These chips power Frontier past
1,100,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second
BY CHARLES Q. CHOI
CARLOS JONES/ORNL/U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
  
TAGS
SUPERCOMPUTERS AMD HPE OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY CRAY CPU GPUS TOP500
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MACHINE LEARNING LIQUID COOLING HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
EXASCALE
The world’s latest fastest supercomputer, Frontier at Oak Ridge

National Lab, in Tennessee, is so powerful that it operates faster
than the next seven best supercomputers combined and more
than twice as well as the No. 2 machine. Frontier is not only the
first machine to break the exascale barrier, a threshold of a
billion billion calculations per second, but is also ranked No. 1 as
the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer. Now the
companies that helped build Frontier, Advanced Micro Devices
(AMD) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), reveal the
electronic tricks that make the supercomputer tick.
Frontier consists of 74 HPE Cray EX supercomputing cabinets,

each weighing more than 3,600 kilograms, which altogether hold
more than 9,400 computing nodes. Each node contains one
optimized third-generation AMD EPYC 64-core 2-gigahertz
“Trento” processor for general tasks and four AMD instinct
MI250x accelerators for highly parallel supercomputing and AI
50 acce e ato s o Inside the
6/27/22, 5:05 PM
g Hidden
y pa a e supe co put g a d
World of Legacy IT Systems - IEEE Spectrum
operations, as well as 4 terabytes of flash memory to help quickly

feed the GPUs data. In total, Frontier contains 9,408 CPUs,
37,632 GPUs, and 8,730,112 cores, linked together by 145
kilometers of networking cables. The lab says its world-leading
supercomputer consumes about 21 megawatts.
Keep Reading ↓
NEWS ROBOTICS
Video Friday: Remote-Control Burger Crafting

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos
BY EVAN ACKERMAN
  
TAGS
VIDEO FRIDAY ROBOTICS
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics

videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We
also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the
next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
ERF 2022: 28–30 JUNE 2022, ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
ROBOCUP 2022: 11–17 JULY 2022, BANGKOK
IEEE CASE 2022: 20–24 AUGUST 2022, MEXICO CITY
CLAWAR 2022: 12–14 SEPTEMBER 2022, AZORES, PORTUGAL
ANA AVATAR XPRIZE FINALS: 4–5 NOVEMBER 2022, LOS ANGELES
CORL 2022: 14–18 DECEMBER 2022, AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND
Enjoy today’s videos!
Keep Reading ↓
WEBINAR COMPUTING
Harnessing The Power Of Innovation

Intelligence Through case studies and data
visualizations, this webinar will show you how to
leverage IP and scientific data analytics to identify
emerging business opportunities
BY CLARIVATE
04 MAY 2022 1 MIN READ
  
TAGS
ANALYTICS BIG DATA CLARIVATE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY VISUALIZATION
Business and R&D leaders have to make consequential strategic

decisions every day in a global marketplace that continues to get
more interconnected and complex. Luckily, the job can be more
manageable and efficient by leveraging IP and scientific data
analytics. Register for this free webinar now!
Join us for the webinar, Harnessing the power of innovation

intelligence, to hear Clarivate experts discuss how analyzing IP
data, together with scientific content and industry-specific data,
can provide organization-wide situational awareness and reveal
valuable business insights.
Keep Reading ↓
Trending Stories
The most-read stories on IEEE Spectrum right now
01 02 03
NEWS ROBOTICS FEATURE COMPUTING NEWS COMPUTING
Amazon Shows Quantum Error The Beating

Off Impressive Correction: Heart of the
New Warehouse Time to Make It World’s First
Robots Work Exascale
23 JUN 2022 4 MIN READ 26 JUN 2022 13 MIN READ Supercompute
24 JUN 2022 4 MIN R

Inside The Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems - IEEE Spectrum

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Inside The Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems - IEEE Spectrum

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

6/27/22, 5:05 PM Inside the Hidden World of Legacy IT Systems - IEEE Spectrum

IEEE.ORG SIGN IN JOIN IEEE

28 AUG 2020 17 MIN READ

PHOTO: ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES

This past spring, tens of millions of Americans lost

Delays in processing unemployment claims in 19 states—

Things were so bad in New Jersey that Governor Phil Murphy

Similar problems have emerged at the federal level. As part of

As the legendary investor Warren Buffett once said, “It's only

Atitude e Femilidade | Vivara

But governments aren't the only ones struggling under the

Since 2010, corporations and governments worldwide have

But it's astonishing how seldom people notice these IT systems,

In his landmark study The Shock of the Old: Technology and

Indeed, the very invisibility of legacy IT is a kind of testament to

There's no formal definition of “legacy system," but it's

To modernize a computing system or not is a question that

Worldwide IT Spending since 2010

TRILLION IS A SIGNIFICANT UNDERESTIMATE BECAUSE LABOR

Source: Robert N. Charette, based on data from Gartner and Apptio

Obviously, a legacy system that's critical to day-to-day

This “kick the can" approach is understandable. Most IT

What management does demand, however, is for any new IT

Similarly, the developers of the system, who understand in

Thus does an IT system quietly age into legacy status.

Millions of people every month experience the frustrations

U.K. bank customers know this frustration only too well.

Airline passengers are equally exasperated. Over the past

Poorly maintained legacy IT systems are also prone to

Aging IT systems also open the door to crippling ransomware

Even if they don't suffer an embarrassing and costly failure,

While not all operational and maintenance costs can be

U.S. Federal government spending on IT products and

Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-19-471

Take COBOL, a programming language that dates to 1959.

Given the vast amount of outdated software that's still in use,

The first step in fixing a massive problem is to admit you have

Part of the modernization push by governments in the United

States and abroad has been to provide more effective

“Everyone understands now that IT drives organization

This is already happening in the banking industry. Existing

The Multilayers of the U.S. Navy's Legacy Pay and Personnel

Source: U.S. Naval Enterprise Networks Program Office Presentation, 6 August

Modernization creates its own problems. Take the migration of

Another common issue is that legacy systems have duplicate

Such massive duplication and data silos sound ridiculous, but

“The shortage of thinking about systems engineering" along

Top 10 U.S. Federal Systems Most In Need of Modernization

Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-19-471

The best way to deal with legacy IT is to never let IT become

Here's what that means in practice. Currently, software

DevOps is just one way to keep core IT systems from turning

Since 2015, DARPA has funded research aimed at making

they depend upon and environments in which they operate,"

Creating such timeless systems will require a “start from

The goal is to be able to update or upgrade applications without

The BRASS program has funded nine projects, each of which

industry, and the Defense Department.

Some Major Legacy System Debacles of The Last Decade

Legacy System Modernization Failures

Legacy System Replaced, But Subsequent Operational Difficulties

Outage blamed on legacy IT system