It's that time of the year again: the Top 500 list of supercomputers has been published, as they do every six months. Just for fun, I decided to compare the list released this month to then-current list when OSNews launched; we started in August 1997, so let's compare the list of today to the one from June 1997.
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2006-01-04
OS family 06/97
http://www.top500.org/charts/list/9/osfam
06/09
http://www.top500.org/charts/list/33/osfam
Comments: Why didn't you just steal the charts 
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And I still hate the EM64T name. The thing should be called AMD64, because AMD made it.
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You should however be able to install gnash. Gnash is now up to its 4th beta release:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/
As it says, not everything works, but having said that, a lot of flash that is on the web does in fact work.
Gnash 0.8.5 has fixed quite a bit of the problem of integration with browsers, so it not only plays flash now, it can nearly always download it too. Thats a bonus.
Member since:2005-07-06
AMD64 (or x86-64) and EM64T are not the same thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Differences_between_AMD64_and_I...
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2005-12-15
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Well, no.
A supercomputer isn't a computer - it's a large number of individual computers cooperating as a cluster. With this in mind you could probably get a collection of 20 billion Commodore 64's and connect them all together, and be in the top 500 list without actually being able to run any modern software... ;-)
-Brendan
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You shouldn't joke about having 20 billion C64's. Its just cruel. My mind goes wild with delirious dreams of writing parallel programs on the array in Basic with chocked full of enough peeks and pokes to make perl look as readable as Dick & Jane.
One Day.... How well is C64 supported by virtual machines? anyone know?
Member since:2005-07-24
Do schools still use Sally, Dick, and Jane? I suppose they now have smart phones and iPods. And Spot probably has a GPS transponder implant. What was the cat's name? I can't remember.
Edited 2009-06-28 17:53 UTC
Member since:
2005-07-06
I don't know, because it was pretty obvious over ten years ago that all the proprietary Unix vendors with hardware to protect would do absolutely anything to ensure their Unix operating systems would not run on any x86 system. The Unix they all feared ended up being Linux, all the big Unix and hardware vendors went into denial apart from IBM, and it is interesting to see how many of those companies producing hardware on that list in 1997 have now either gone bust or are in serious trouble.
Member since:2006-01-19
Some saw the signs (SGI) and converted their hardware to Linux. The Altix machines are good vertical number crunchers.
it's a pity they still seem to be in trouble.
On the other hand, currently you can get a 4 core, 24 GB RAM machine for €2000,-, and lots of calculations actually can be handled by these machines.
If I scale this money to a 16 core, 96 GB RAM SGI Altix, then the Altix should cost no more than €8000,-
Unfortunately with that machine configuration you get nowhere near that price.
I hope Microsoft programming continues to demand higher and higher power machines, so that consumers continue to demand stronger and stronger machines, so that those machines reach the consumer sector and give me the opportunity to run Linux on those then cheap machines and do number-crunching on it.
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2007-01-18
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2009-06-25
I like the diversity. I have worked on Sparc, Power, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium and Cray machines (all having some form of Unix) and it was quite fun to have all the little and big differences, different development tools, design decisions etc. Now most systems are basic Linux, which makes things easier but also more boring. Back to diversity!
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Very custom hardware with a Linux kernel moulded to fulfil a given task - I don't want to start an anti-Linux thread but I do think that people need to realise that it doesn't say anything about Linux other than the ability to have access to source code and being able to make incredible optimisations and tweaking because of it.
Linux was in the right place at the right time; there are many other open source operating systems that, had it gained the momentum that Linux did in the early days - would be just as likely to have jumped into the top 500. A lot of what we see today is thanks not just to GNU/Linux and the talent behind it but also a reasonable amount of good luck.
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Unfortunately on this website there is a habit by individuals to mark down anything that doesn't mark Linux as the pinnacle of perfection - if there are problems, its always the end users fault rather than flaws in the system itself (as seen with the review of Linux on my Acer Aspire One a few months ago).
