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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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*
Member since:
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!