Submitted by 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.
Hey… I bet Cousin’ Steve thinks that’s a truck of IP money that some organizations owe microsoft, right?
The one patent I bet they won’t file against a GNU/Linux providers is “Method to crash a computer every once in a while for no apparent reason”. 😀
The complete OS statistics are as follows:
Linux: 426 systems (85.2%)
Mixed: 34 systems (6.8%)
Unix: 30 systems (6%)
Windows: 6 systems (1.2%)
BSD: 2 systems (0.4%)
Mac OS: 2 systems (0.4%)
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.
“BSD: 2 systems (0.4%) ”
http://www.top500.org/charts/list/30/os
http://www.top500.org/stats/list/30/os
Where did you get two super computer running BSD from ? The charts and stats List zero.
Free software has a clear advantage at this subject, since supercomputing architecture would make it almost impossible to pay the number of licenses needed to build such monsters otherwise … well, apart that they run quick and reliable, of course.
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
be fair – at least windows has finally beaten osx!
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!
“why not many rum BSD? ”
Why not ** ANY ** run BSD , the reality is today in the top 500 there is zero BSD. ( BSD based ( Mac OS X , Super-UX ) using BSD code ( all of them )But no BSD kernel and OS based.)
http://www.top500.org/charts/list/30/os
http://www.top500.org/stats/list/30/os
BSD
1) It’s broken.
2) It’s illegal.
3) Nobody support it.
4) Nobody Financially support creation of one and fix it’s broken parts , change and remove there illegal parts or pay someone to support it.
5) No community work done for changes
6) BSD don’t care so they don’t mater.
7) No legal protection.
http://www.top500.org/charts/list/30/vendors
When out of IBM , DELL , Linux networx , Cray , HP , SGI , others aka all of the vendor of supercomputer and maker of them NONE of them sale or actively support or is created for the purpose of supporting BSD.
“It’s tied with Mac OS X Server for heaven’s sake!”
Mac OS X is not used/sold/supported as a server OS or supercomputer OS by anyone outside Apple vendor support base. Apple is not pushing server solutions , and is not respected as a supplier of server and server OS ( only on Apple Hardware is a big turn off for the majority of server user’s and that use to mean PPC based computers. )
BSD’s people have been living in a lie and there own hubris for 4 decades.
BSD’s ( who are really anti-themself , auto-destructive and paranoiac ) have this fabulation that an OS supported by the current best hardware maker and vendor and by multi billion company and the best BSD minds who all now work on GNU/Linux is inferior to there pathetic offer and work and results.
What can I say , Moron here , will tell you I am anti-BSD to explain why they have zero ( less then 10 identified as BSD based even do they had 2 decade before GNU/Linux became a reality ) supercomputer running there OS. It’s annoying them to have someone who would like BSD to be on par with GNU/Linux , because everyone who is sane and an expert like me will tell you :
A strong , independent , realistic , pragmatic and competitive BSD would make for a stronger and better GNU/Linux. They would also be close or on par or superior in number to GNU/Linux in usage and installation based across the many category we put on OS ( supercomputer , server , desktop , workstation ). This also mean that they would get investment from the hardware maker for the driver to support there OS.
From zero one can only go up , but it’s not by fighting over others quality and false perception and false reality you have about the world that you will improve yourself.
The moron and real Anti-BSD can mod me down now.
Edited 2007-11-14 03:29
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).
freebsd kernel does not scale well on parallel machine until 7.0. The previous kernel is not designed for smp.
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*
What strikes me as remarkable is how quickly the market of very high-performance computing changes. Looking at the statistics, popularity of CPU architectures and operating systems is rapidly changing; e.g., Linux got a boost from 75% to 80% in just six months.
5% of 500 is just 25 supercomputers. That isn’t very many, really.
I am not at all surprised to see a 5% change in such a competitive environment.
It went from 77 to 85% – an improvement of 8%. In six months. If that’s not a lot for you….
but this list only shows 500 computers. There are more than a million around. now 25 comps may be small but 50,000 isn’t,
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.
Maybe they counted the cores 🙂
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