Python on the AS/400?

[Kragen Sitaker]

I have a Python program I'd like to run on an AS/400.

Actually, I don't have an AS/400; what I really want is to be able to
tell customers that it runs on the AS/400 with such-and-such
performance.

I use select.select (via asyncore), so I can't run my program at all in
Jython, and if I implemented select and non-blocking sockets in Java so
I could, it would be pathetically nonscalable (unless I used Matt
Welsh's NBIO JNI module: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mdw/proj/java-nbio 
--- which probably doesn't run on the AS/400.)

I found http://home.no.net/pgummeda/, which is a port of CPython 2.0 to
the AS/400, which is wonderful.

So I have a couple of questions:
- is the AS/400 a reasonable platform to do this kind of thing on ---
  running network servers that handle thousands of simultaneous TCP
  connections efficiently?  I'm afraid I'm pretty ignorant about
  AS/400s in general, so please forgive me if this is an insulting
  question.
- does the AS/400 CPython port have select.select?  Does it have any
  kind of reasonable performance?
- how stable is the AS/400 CPython port?
- is there an AS/400 on which I could get an account (for under $1000,
  say) so I could run some tests?  Or do I have to buy my own?  It
  looks like they cost several thousand dollars on eBay.
-- 
<kragen at pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we possess
ourselves.
       -- Gandalf the White [J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Two Towers", Bk 3, Ch. XI]