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 had an Altair S-100 kit that had the big floppies. Had paper tape reader dor it, too.
/johnny
None - the NSA does not publish their capabilities on the Top500 list.
Do large machines at the NSA run Linux? Yes. Do they mine our data with those machines? Yes. Where would the primary NSA systems rank in the list if they were published? Their list ranking would be in the single digits.
Indeed. Thank God I don't have to deal with resources stolen because of anti-virus and malware scanners and other useless garbage.
I point I make quite often when comparing the two OS's salient points.
I too run the 'doze OS for those high-end Computer Assisted Design programs, specifically because they are not yet ported to Linux. Some of those programs however are already ported to Unix and Solaris so I am hopeful that once the userbase in Linux reaches a certain point the vendors will realize the market opening up and start offering them.
Really ticks off the Macophiles when I point out how out of all those high-end design programs, there are NO versions available for any apple boxen. The audible grinding of their teeth is always worth a grin and a smirk at them.
Ubuntu is very user friendly if you just need to go online and use OpenOffice and that kind of thing.
I felt it was good enough that I recommended it to my “cheap” friend. Meanwhile, I’m not much better. I’ve been using the free “starter” version of Office on my home machine for quite a while. I’ve made business cards, graphics for my bands, not to mention text documents without missing anything. Even without the ruler. I think they accidentally made it too robust. ;-)
A VT-100 terminal and a D/A board that was homemade. And RS-232. ;)
/johnny
Linux people crack me up.
Walk into any Fortune 500 business and about 99.9% of the time you will find they are running Windows operating systems (desktop and server). Microsoft owns, oh, about 90% of the market share for home OS as well. SQL Server is the #1 database server and Exchange in the #1 email server. The list goes on and on.
But Microsoft is dying. LOL!
(Microsoft MCSE)
Okay, the RS-232 should take care of your output. Modem needs as well! You must have gotten an earth-shaking 300 baud out of that!
Awesome program! I have a very old copy which runs on WinXP, so I'm nursing my XP laptop (3.06Ghz P4, 2GB, reasonable graphics card for that era) to keep it working.
The Tri-Ball in IronCAD is an awesome tool.
If you want to get into the billions of computers, you've got to include embedded systems, most of which run neither Linux nor Windows. However, embedded systems big enough to need a real OS, e.g., your home router, are quite likely to be running Linux.
Most of the world's smartphones and tablets are running either Android, which is based on Linux, or iOS, which isn't Linux but is based on another Unix. Windows is way behind in that segment.
It's true that most of the world's laptops and desktops are still running Windows. However, even there, a lot of the useful work uses the web, which is mostly powered by Linux.
(The chart is interactive at the source) |
Google has run Linux since the beginning and now probably has the largest collection of Linux boxes in the world. Some years ago a Google engineer gave a talk in which he outlined how Google's servers are configured. He boasted that they were getting the performance of a large Sun server at a tenth the cost. He didn't even mention Windows.
It is well known that sophisticated computer users use Macs as their personal computers and run Linux on their servers.
I count at least six MacBook Pros in that "Dumb terminal" photo you posted, which depicts the JPL control room during the successful landing of Curiosity on Mars in August of 2012. Here's another view of the scene.
I have moved ninet people from Windows to Ubuntu within the past 6 months.
They came to me with heavily infected and/or non-operational windows machines.
In short order most were able to get comfortable with Ubuntu and fall in love with it.
Not one has called back with a problem. A few were true computer neophytes -- deathly afraid of leaving windows.
To me, that's surprising. If they're running on any "unix and solaris" systems, a port to OSX should be really straightforward, as it is a genuine Unix. It'll probably happen eventually.
HA. I’m the guy on the right in the bottom one, but I’m not overweight.
Not one has called back with a problem. A few were true computer neophytes — deathly afraid of leaving windows.
In both cases, the dual boot was too much. I expect to switch it on and it works. And works with pretty much any software I can get. I suppose if I had an internet only machine with rudimentary word processing needs I might consider linux. Actually, I’ve got two computers collecting dust. I should try it again with one of them.
None of them have special software needs. They mostly surf the web, do email and use open office. I like not having to be bugged to clean infected systems....
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