Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 13th Nov 2007 16:17 UTC, submitted by diegocg
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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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