With 97 percent of the world's fastest supercomputers running Linux,
the open-source operating system has eliminated almost all its rivals.
Posted on 06/25/2014 10:20:01 AM PDT by ShadowAce
For years, Linux has ruled supercomputing. So, it came as no surprise to anyone at the Linux Enterprise End-User Summit near Wall Street that once again the Top500 group found in its latest supercomputer ranking that Linux was the fastest of the fast operating systems.
With 97 percent of the world's fastest supercomputers running Linux,
the open-source operating system has eliminated almost all its rivals.
As one Red Hat representative said, "The only thing that would be surprising about Linux being the top dog would be if anything else even came close." He doesn't have any reason to worry.
In the latest contest, not only did Linux dominate, but Linux showed that is slowly pushing out all its competitors. In the June 2014 Top 500 supercomputer list, the top open-source operating system set a new high with 485 systems out of the fastest 500 running Linux. In other words 97 percent of the fastest computers in the world are based on Linux.
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Of the remaining 16, 13 run Unix. They appear to be running IBM AIX since they're all running on IBM Power processors. The fastest of these boxes, the United Kingdom's weather predicting system, ECMWF, ranked 60th in the world.
Two Windows boxes squeezed into the list. The best of these, coming in at 294th place, is at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. The remaining supercomputer, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology machine, runs a mix of AIX/Unix and Linux. Solaris and BSD Unix no longer have even a toe-hold in the rankings.
The overall performance growth rate of all the systems, however, is at a historical low. For the slowest supercomputer, number 500, performance has "lagged behind historical growth trends for the past five years, a trajectory that now increases by only 55 percent each year. Between 1994 and 2008, however, the annual growth rate for the No. 500 systems’ performance was 90 percent."
The hardware vendors are trying to goose supercomputer performance by making faster processors. Intel's forthcoming Xeon Phi many-core chip, codenamed Knight's Landing, is designed to deliver up to three trillion double precision floating point operations per second (3 Teraflops) in a single processor socket. That's three times faster than Intel's current highest performance chip.
At the same time, Linux is tackling its own performance bottlenecks. A great deal of the talk at Linux Enterprise End-User Summit has been about how to drastically improve the latency in both storage and network stacks.
Why so much emphasis on performance when Linux is already the operating system of choice for anyone wanting the fastest computing? Because research and businesses, especially the stock markets and trading companies, not only want but need even faster computers. To meet this demand for ever more speed, Linux is not resting on its laurels but working hard on going ever faster.
I’ve been running Linux since 1994-1995. I am not a “zealot”.
For my last 5-1/2 years with a company I moved data from AS400 to PC’s every day. And pushed the data back after processing. Part of my work was done in Windows and part in Redhat Linux. I needed both to get the job done.
I composed and published a 3,000+ page catalog plus supplements and indexes, huge seasonal promotion pieces and monthly specials. Database publishing.
The process was a total hack.
I also created the images for both print and the web.
Linux is incredibly powerful for batch processing images.
Linux is no longer a toy, it is a incredible work tool.
I am NOT NEW to this, I built my first PC in 1982.
I don’t want to force anyone to use Linux. I do wish there were more games being made for it though.
Emulators are pretty cool in the meantime.
Talk about reaching.
Very few computer users will ever have access to a super computer. one of the few that do, I can bet, are likely the federal spies mining our data.
Is that more clear?
Windoze is slow to boot and do anything. Kid borrowed my compter for an hour or so, and wanted to know how I got it to run so fast.
I’m also the one they turn to when their windoze boxes have Office version incompatibilities.
/johnny
Here's a list of over 450. How many do you want?
I really like windows 7. Don’t know about 8. Linux has advantages. I ran ubuntu about three years ago for a while.
And I also used to own a Beta VCR that was better than any of my friends’ VHS machines.
My computer is now a commodity, like my car. I don’t have to be a mechanic to drive my car, and I don’t have to worry about highmem or anything else regarding my computer - thanks to windows. Once I understand it as I understand the controls for my car, I simply use it.
Also, it’s easy to get someone to work on your volkswagen than your Elf Formula 1 car.
Linux is not yet that user friendly for those of us that see our computer as a commodity/tool.
Ubuntu is very user friendly if you just need to go online and use OpenOffice and that kind of thing.
“Linux is not yet that user friendly for those of us that see our computer as a commodity/tool.”
Personally, I think Ubuntu 12 is more friendly than Windows 8, but I agree, some breeds of linux require quite a bit of technical knowledge to install and maintain.
bump
It’s been a while. Still got the 8 in. floppies though.
/johnny
I always had the idea that if I won the lottery I would buy the right to port a lot of old games to Linux (and maybe pay some people to upgrade the graphics too)
I think it would be cool to see some of my favorite old old games back in use.
They’re not just old games. I play Civilization V on linux, natively.
Funny about that.
As far as i know, the major CAD programs do not run their Client versions in Linux. Most are Windows only.
Some of us classify CAD and the associated engineering as "real work".
There are some old games I loved that I want to resurrect, let me dream! :p
I think you can play the old Infocom games on Linux.
I like the emulators but the keyboard is no replacement for a game controller. I need to get one of those things.
Surprised the macophiles have not jumped in yet. I remember one loon who was frothing at the mouth at Me not too long ago when I pointed out how his apple bricks were good for little more than paint and poster projects.
Kind of reminded Me of this one graphics chip programmer who swore up and down that if people would just listen to him, his beloved graphics chipset(s) would simply run rings around any standard cpu with a little tweaking of the basic OS.
And, of course, they show really pretty fonts for when you need a fancypants terminal to chat and send messages on:
(Example of Dumb Terminals in use)
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