Submitted by The #1 supercomputer in the world, the IBM Roadrunner, produced at a cost of nearly $100 million dollars, runs Fedora. IBM has been working on and contributing to Fedora, using it as a prototype for the new cell architecture that leads to this supercomputer.
Will it be running normal vanilla Fedora?
Well, they won’t be using YUM, so it’s all good 🙂
I bet yum is actually fast on that one, tho.
Well, they won’t be using YUM, so it’s all good 🙂
Yum bashing is so old-school. I have a dual boot of Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8 and the speeds of running an update between yum and apt-get are similar. Okay, apt-get is faster still and I have less problems with it than yum. If you haven’t used Fedora 9 you might be surprised how quickly yum runs now. It is true that older versions were dog slow and problematic but I haven’t run into any problems updating a system with Fedora 9 and yum.
Getting back to the article… If you run Fedora without a GUI and kill all unnecessary services it makes an excellent server. My box at home runs Apache and MySQL from the CLI and it I only have to restart it when there is a kernel update. It amazes me how rock solid reliable it is.
Edited 2008-07-15 18:40 UTC
I hear it boots in less than 5 seconds and can crash in less than 8!
So now I can tell people I own a miniature version of the worlds fastest supercomputer in my living room, and it plays Gran Turismo.
Based on horsepower output from the cell processor, the PS3 is actually classified as a supercomputer by current benchmarks. Apple had the first desktop available to consumers which broke past the supercomputer benchmark at it’s time of release.
I don’t know if any of that is remotely on topic or even if you meant because you had a custom rig running fedora as your media center machine. You just reminded me of a conversation a while back when a friend pointed to his PS3 and said; “I can claim that I have a supercomputer to play my games on.”
If not mentioned in this article, I read elsewhere that (I thought it was Red Hat proper but), Fedora runs against the intel cpu for general workload while something else handles heavy workload through the cell processors. With it being IBM, I just assumed they did some custom code or used there own inhouse build on top of a Linux kernel against the cells though.
Of course it runs Fedora. What else did you think it would run, Windows? Fedora IS pretty much THE main stream for all Linux Distros, you know.
Ubuntu just has a rabid following.
For something like that, I’d have thought Debian for stability, Slack for tradition or Gentoo for a truly custom build for the hardware. With the mention of Red Hat, I just assumed it would be Enterprise rather than the community version with all the R/D code that is tested there first. A BSD could be a good choice too. It must require code in the stability relm of real-time certification with that many co-processing machines.
Oh.. all this talk of clustering is making me want to collect PS2 and throw them on a rack with an old laptop cluster master. Hm.. maybe I’ll start by booting every machine in the house off a clusterix liveCD and see if I can make the lights dim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_(operating_system)#Fedora-based_distributions
The only distro i know in that list is yellow dog linux. There will be more Fedora users than any of it’s offshoots.
http://www.debian.org/misc/children-distros
I’d also wager there are a lot more users of debian based distro’s on desktops.
I don’t like Ubuntu and i won’t be using it any time soon but it is Debian based. If you count Ubuntu forks as well the list is even bigger.
So if fedora is THE main stream for Linux distro’s where are the streams?
You are of course missing out a hell lot of derivative distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OLPC etc.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DerivedDistributions
Not to be obtuse, but I didn’t see any reference to Fedora in the article itself. It actually reads:
Roadrunner operates on open-source Linux software from Red Hat.
Perhaps it’s unlikely that they bought a RHEL license for their supercomputer, but still… The article does not say Fedora.
Refer slide 4. They have both Fedora and RHEL
http://sti.cc.gatech.edu/SC07-BOF/06-Borrett.pdf
I can’t manage to see where it says that it runs Fedora.
In other words, it will be running simulations to predict the yield and destructive capability of our nuclear weapons, without actually running physical weapons tests. I’ll bet the code hippies are going to lose some sleep tonight, when they realize that their work is helping to make the DOD a more efficient killing machine.
As if this was the first time it’s being used for military purposes.
I’d bet they’ll sleep a lot better knowing nuclear weapons safety doesn’t deppend on you-know-what.
Fedora is the test bed for the next RHEL releases.
Look at VMWare, it is Red Hat Linux also, Red Hat is the defacto standard in Linux distro’s!