The twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is expected to become an hot topic of discussion as the latest list shows five new entrants in the Top 10, which is a big turnover and shows how active the supercomputer market is. 71% Of the supercomputers now use Intel processors, a big grow from 58% 6 months ago. Linux monopolizes the OS area with 85% of the supercomputers (77% 6 months ago) using Linux-based operative systems.
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2006-04-28
Member since:2006-03-12
The graphs are better.
http://www.top500.org/charts/list/30/osfam.
Oddly windows vanishes on the second one. I liked the windows cluster ads on the top of the page.
Member since:
2006-07-26
Member since:2007-02-17
This reasoning only applies for clusters.
From the article: "A total of 406 systems are labeled as clusters, making this the most common architecture in the TOP500 with a stable share of 81.2 percent."
Only a cluster system would require a large number of licenses.
Windows writes itself out of contention to run on the 18.8% of top 500 supercomputers which are not clusters because neither the x86 nor the x86_64 architectures are supercomputer CPUs.
Or, stated another way, Linux wins this race because of two main reasons:
(1) it doesn't have per-copy license fees, and
(2) it is way, way more portable to different architectures.
Nothing scales the way that Linux does.
Edited 2007-11-14 08:11
Member since:2007-07-27
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2006-10-28
I never knew that so many supercomputers used linux. Linux may be losing market share in small servers (though I'm skeptical) but it's obviously gained in the large system market. On the other hand, I wonder why not many rum BSD? I didn't expect it to be more popular than linux but I still expected around 10% for it. 0.4 is surprising. It's tied with Mac OS X Server for heaven's sake!
RE: Interesting growth in Linux.
Member since:2006-04-25
I never knew that so many supercomputers used linux. Linux may be losing market share in small servers (though I'm skeptical) but it's obviously gained in the large system market. On the other hand, I wonder why not many rum BSD?
There is a direct correlation between the hardware vendor and the software run on the system. All of the big iron vendors are either offering their aging proprietary systems or linux.
BSD is more commonly used by small hardware vendors, the sort who sell networking equipment (firewalls, routers and such).
Member since:2006-07-24
Member since:2006-09-29
i was at the sc07 conference last week, and not so surprisingly i also run (and run jobs on) clusters and big smp type machines
the reason why bsd is almost never choosen is purely vendor support for hardware (and sometimes software stacks) i guess its down to man power to port drivers and software stacks over to bsd if people really want it.
also in the HPC arena there is a debate going on whether linux is the right thing to be using since it doesnt suit HPC needs 100% of the times but it does attract new young developers to the scene. some of the alternatives available to the HPC people is either microkernels (cray and ibm have these on various machines), monolithic kernels such as linux, solaris, aix and direct access to hardware (cell), personally I'm leaning towards more direct access to the hardware and less of the operating system/kernel getting in the way of my compute jobs. who knows linux may not become the dominant OS as the size of supercomputers increase in size it might be *something else*
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2006-03-31
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Exactly.
How can there be a million computers in the top 500?
You aren't making any sense. The increase in Linux that was originally remarked upon in this topic was an increase from 75% of the top 500 last time to 80% of the top 500 now. That 5% increase therefore represents just 25 additional supercomputers running Linux.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:
2005-08-28
I'm rather surprised at the Hitachi SK11000 machines...
They're the only supercomputers on that list with less than 100 processors, and seem to outperform many machines with thousands of processors (#197, #198, #441).
All the site tells me is that they're using POWER5+ processors, but I'd be surprised if they're the only ones.
Edited 2007-11-14 18:01