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.
Yup. When you want real work to get done, you use Linux/Unix. When you want to play games, Windows will suffice.
Although these days, with Steam approving and greenlighting Linux games at an extreme rate, it may not suffice for very much longer.
Spoken like a true Linux Zealot...
I deal with your type all the time. This is the same attitude they had BEFORE windows took over desktops for $trillions of dollars of revenue
Microsoft has a tenacious hold on office environments, and many deluxe third party applications are purposed only to Windows, but Linux is catching up even there.
Microsoft had better business acumen.
Linux is software.
Oh really? My wife and I both make our living doing real work with Windows, for the most part. I suspect that most "work" getting done on today's computers is still done on Windows.
And no, I am not a Windows fanboy, in fact, I still have Gentoo linux installed on one PC. Compiled that one nearly from scratch. I have to admit though that Ubuntu is probably the distro of choice for most regular people.
Linux doesn’t have a bunch of crap running in the background
No Vax or C/PM?
/johnny
Meh. I don’t run ZOS at home either.
I have a friend whow is really cheap. They use open office. I use office 2010.
I’m able to get a lot more “real” work done AND enjoy games.
And the last dual boot machine I had was windows and os2 warp. Never again.
I’ve never claimed to be anything other than a Linux partisan. Unlike the majority of MS-Window zealots though, I actually have extensive experience with both, and haven’t formed my opinions from ignorance.
Is this seriously what Linux people are bragging about?
500 computers that almost no one will ever use, that just chucks out raw data? Of course they use Linux!
And guess what? 99% of the computers that will ever do anything remotely useful with that data are not running Linux, and number in the billions.
I shudder to think how many of those 500 machines are used by the NSA to mine our data.
I have used one flavor of linux since 97 almost exclusively and haven’t looked back. Windows is fine for certain things, but if you are say for example a scientific modeler who wants their lattice-boltzmann code to run as lean and mean as absolutely possible, unencumbered by background processes and other computational clutter, then linux is the choice hands down. But I wouldn’t force the receptionist at the front desk to use it.
Every time I have to borrow a windows 7 or 8 laptop from a niece I find the waiting time to do anything agonizing. They have so much crap running in the background they run like molasses. I am always glad to get back on my Linux machine.
and emulators are nifty too
I’ve used both and both have their strong points and weak points. Really depends on your needs, budget and expertise. I don’t see one as any more or less productive than the other. That is in the hands of the user.
Are you a bot? Your fourth sentence is the exact opposite of your second sentence. I’d suggest opening a help ticket for your developer(s) to try to increase your consistency.
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