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Linux Claims 4 of the Top 5 Supercomputer Spots
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."
While this will not do much to encourage the Unwashed Masses to embrace Linux, it certainly shows that Linux is a serious operating system suited to high-powered computing (or at least to hosting high-powered computing applications). I hope at least a few Fortune 500 CIOs will take notice.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Itanium already has no popularity whatsoever. If it can't even be successful in the supercomputer market, it can't succeed anywhere (last I looked, itanium had truly awe-inspiring FP but was slow at everything else.)
MY HEART WILL GO ONNNNNNNN!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They regularly publish how many beige boxes they have...
This sig is the express property of someone.
The concern isn't whether or not these supercomputers run Microsoft software, but whether or not Linux is a worthy alternative to top-end *nixes.
Of course, it is, and that's all this shows.
I wouldn't want to be the tech guy trying to explain to the project admins that they would have to fork out 2.5 million dollars in license fee's to microsoft!... Let's also not forget that having the source code allows them to make changes to fit any particular harware or software methodology...
You're free to build your "supercomputer" any way you want: one processor overclocked in the THz range, 1 million Vic-20s, or 1 billion smart hamsters.
What matters is the Linpack performance that you get out of your machine. The Linpack benchmark is parallelizable but not "embarassingly" parallelizable. Gluing two boxes together with crazy glue does not allow you to run the Linpack benchmark twice as fast.
I swear I'm not trying to be a troll here, but am I the only one who is not really impressed by speed figures of multi-cpu systems? All you have to do to beat one is build an identical system but add a new processor or two, and all that takes is more money, not more invention or innovation.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Freedom. Especially if you specify capital-UNIX and not just Unix.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I use it as a desktop and find it very usable. Thats enough for me. Linux has never been about snagging market share wich is something many Windows jockeys has a hard time understanding. Linux success doesnt stand and fall with the number of users. If it stays at 10% so what? There should really be 10 different OS out there competing and 10% of that is pretty good.
HTTP/1.1 400
If you want a good explanation for the Itanic drop-off, look to the funding side of things. Follow the money, and all will be explained. Read a lot into this.
-Charlie
There should really be 10 different OS out there competing and 10% of that is pretty good.
You're obviously too young to remember the OS wars... C64, IMB-compatible, Apple (Mac), Amiga, etc. It used to be a real nightmare to buy and even more of a pain to develop software. As someone who was a geek during those days, I can say that things in the world of PC's are MUCH better today than they were when we actually had a lot of OS competition.
I don't respond to AC's.
There's probably at least two camps of Linux users, based on their belief on whether marketshare is important or not. I'm somewhere in the middle.
On the one extreme is people who don't give a rat's ass if other people use it or not, or at least say this. On the other extreme is people who want global domination.
The problem with the first extreme is that for the whole open-source concept to work, you have to have a critical mass of users so that you have a large enough base of developers (which are a subset of the users) to keep the project working. Since most open-source software isn't owned by corporations (though some is certainly supported to some extent by them), open-source requires a large number of users to help work on the various projects.
The problem with the other extreme is that, in order to make Linux (as a group of distributions) a viable choice for all current Windows users, certain concessions and changes might have to be made, such as providing an API for closed-source drivers, removing features from the most popular software because it's "too flexible" for many users, standardizing on one desktop (GNOME or KDE), etc. Many powerful people in the open-source community don't like these things, and it's quite debatable whether they might end up hurting or destroying the open-source movement instead of helping it. (For instance, if it became easy to distribute closed-source drivers, then while Linux might become more popular initially, it might suffer from the same problem as Windows where companies release crappy drivers for their hardware, which makes Linux systems unreliable, and the companies refuse to help any open-source driver efforts).
Personally, I don't want Linux to become a commercialized, closed-source OS with a few open-source bits, but all the important stuff closed as some companies are trying to do. I also don't care if "Aunt Tillie" uses it, as long as she doesn't ask me for free support for her Windows computer, so I don't really care about it becoming the dominant OS. What I do want is for it to gain enough marketshare so that it's taken seriously, most hardware is supported on it (by open-source drivers), most worthwhile application software is ported to it, and that there's enough business in it that the dominant distros can make very polished versions without any major shortcomings like we still see today. In a nutshell, I want to be able to use Linux at work and at home to do anything I need to do (including buying and using the latest TurboTax or AutoCAD, for instance), without ever running into any major problems because I don't use Windows. If Linux reached 50% marketshare, this dream would probably be realized. The Windows users could happily live with their BSODs, activations, client-access licenses, high license prices, etc., and me and the other Linux users could happily ignore all that crap without being hindered because some web site is "optimized" for IE, TurboTax doesn't have a Linux version, ATI cards have crap drivers for Linux, etc.
Already, we're getting fairly close: certain types of hardware still have serious driver problems (video cards and WLAN adaptors), most lower-end commercial software does not have a Linux version (although much high-end software, such as that by MentorGraphics, Cadence, etc., does), and we still have serious problems with non-HTML-compliant websites. But on the plus side, we have a very reliable kernel and OS, we have very functional desktop environments (GNOME and KDE, and apps from one will work in the other), we have tons of free software to satisfy most of your needs both on the server and the desktop, and we have tons of drivers for most popular and also much older and obscure hardware. We're at the point now where you can get a recent Linux distro and install it, easily and quickly, on the hardware of your choice, and probably not run into any problems at all. You'll get tons of included software (web browsers, CD burners, word processors, etc.), and be able to do just about anything you reasonably need to do with a computer, unless perhaps your raison d'etre is to play all the latest 3D PC games.
Look on Slashdot's front page. Do enough refreshes and you'll see a massive ad for a book that basically proclaims you are a moron if you don't switch to Linux.
<Insert comment about stupid Microsoft, Borland, etc ad about new wiz-bang product being the second coming of Jesus>
Ie, there's books and ads for just about anything.
All the time I see evangilism on how much better things would be if we all ran Linux. No viruses, no license fees, no crashes, etc, etc.
Well, most evangilism is about Linux now. Yes, there are some idiots who believe there would be no viruses (history would disagree) or no crashes (there's crashes now, though thankfully having open source means it's more likely that once can find the cause if one's willing to do some work).
There are a great many in the Linux community that seem to believe the ultimate Linux goal should be the domaination of the OS market.
Cue the moron comment again. Fanatics tend to be like that. Just look at Apple fanatics.
Of course non[e] are willing to change Linux in the ways needed for this, but they state it as a goal all the same.
Well, some probably are actually. But you're right that the majority of fanatics aren't interested in changing Linux to meet the demands of the general public. To a certain extent I'm happy with that, since some of the demands of the general public are stupid (mostly, the removal of various security features to make it "easier"). Of course, working to solve those shortcomings that makes sense would make sense.
Some people don't care about Linux market share, but many do, including most of Slashdot and some very notable figures.
I care about Linux market share. I wouldn't try to claim to know what most (which I take to mean, a majority of) Slashdoters think. Now, yes, many (as in, a sizable number or percentage, but not necessarily a majority) Slashdoters care about Linux's market share (I'm going on the fact that I've seen several thousand comments by various people). But many care primarily because of the side effects of a Linux market share. That doesn't necessitate that they're out there evangelizing. It's hard to say, though, that they don't have something of a vested interest in insuring that there isn't a single company using their monopoly to interfere with the development, deployment, or sale of competing goods. So, again, I care about Linux market share. That doesn't mean I, or others, am an idiot who would try to push everyone towards it.
I've often been berated because I won't switch, and told my reasons for refusing to do so are invalid.
Perhaps you should try to ignore such people, just as you have to ignore any fanatic. It's virtually impossible to argue with a fanatic. It's best to simply drop the subject. Just like it's necessary at times to drop the subject about what happens to a person after they die, since some people don't like the "I don't know" as a complete answer.
Be sure to include price, power consumption, and floor space in your engineering comparison. Vector processors are fast, but if you can only amortize the design cost over 5,120 units instead of 50M they get pretty expensive.
Ah, but most OSes (with the notable exception of you-know-who's) adhere to certain standards, such as POSIX. By standardizing what can be standardized, and by carefully abstracting, it becomes easier to develop for a wider range of OSes.
Anyway, user share only matters (for us) to the extent that we do not want to be excluded from doing something simply because we haven't enough users to be relevant. The actual number doesn't matter, only the effect that number has on consideration of our OS as a "first-class citizen".
I grant you that there was a lot of software that was only available on single platforms back in the day. However the parent is discussing operating systems and your examples are hardware platforms.
And interestingly enough, two of those platforms could run UNIX...
Even if it was that simple, it is incredibly tough to create applications that can harness that power, especially since they work mostly from the ground up with no high level stuff to help them along. Can you imagine allocating memory and threads across 65,536 processors and who know how many gigabytes (terabytes?) of RAM? If so, can I have your autograph?
I am Spartacus
Linux is on 4 of the top 5 supercomputers is due to the fact that it is opensource, and can be modified to fit unusuall hardware. I cannot imagine the process one would have to go through to get changes to be made to the way a closed source OS will function on more than 1000 CPUs; all I know is that it is an inconvientient one. Opensource wins out because of the tremendous flexabilty it has to change rapidly.
Interestingly, none of those are the OS used in the only top 5 computer not running Linux.
It's AIX.
First of all, this is not the "OS wars" so much as the machine wars - these are all different machines, even if they do use different OSes - the only reason they have different OSes is because their OSes were written specifically with that machine in mind. This is no different today - you still can't run MS Windows on a Mac.
Second of all, each of these OSes had their own strengths and weaknesses, right?
And third of all, as long as they follow standards, there'd be no problem. I have yet to hear anyone say that they have trouble switching between Opera and Firefox. In fact many of the problems we have with computers today such as vendor lock-in and version incompatibilities are partially due to *certain companies* (AKA MS) not following standards.
www.linuxpenguin.net