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Linux Claims 4 of the Top 5 Supercomputer Spots

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the super-today-desktop-tomorrow dept.

Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that the November 2005 list of supercomputers has been published. Certainly something to note is that four of the top five use linux. Relatedly Multiflow writes "CNET is reporting that the number of supercomputers on the Top500 list which use Intel Itanium 2 microprocessors has fallen by almost 50% in the past year. While new higher performance Itanium chips are in the pipeline, the article reports that 64 bit Xeons and Opterons have increased their representation on Top500."

3 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. linux? Not exactly. by daknapp · · Score: 5, Informative

    Where, exactly, did you get the information that these systems "run linux?"

    In the Blue/Gene system, for example, the user front-end nodes use linux, but the OS for the system itself is very definitely NOT linux. So acting as if the system runs off a linux kernel is misleading, to say the very least!

  2. Re:linux? Not exactly. by daknapp · · Score: 5, Informative

    In fact, here is the most relevent passage from the article:

    The computational core of 65,536 compute nodes is partitioned into 1,024 logical processing sets, called psets. Each pset consists of one I/O node running Linux and 64 compute nodes running a custom compute node kernel(CNK).
  3. Re:linux? Not exactly. by __aanekd3853 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The compute nodes of Blue Gene/L do not run anything that may be called an OS. They basically run a single application thread per processor, and they do not do any sophisticated system work at all (no context switches, the single user process has access to all the memory, etc). The system tasks are concentrated in the so-called I/O-nodes, and those run Linux. So all the system-related things there are Linux indeed. See this paper, for instance.

    Note that I/O nodes and not "front-end" nodes. All the front-end machines (there are many) run Linux as well.

    All the user-level stuff (the programming model, tools, compilers, etc) is standard Linux, too.

    So, is it Linux?

    [Disclaimer: I have worked on some system aspects of the beast, but this post is not sanctioned by BG/L team or IBM or LLNL. I am not disclosing anything proprietary here - all this is open info that can be found in many papers on the subject. Check out IBM Journal of R&D for a wealth of information.