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."

Comments

niche market?

[OffTheLip]

It may be a niche market but what a market it is. Rock on Linux!

Re:niche market?

[Tanktalus]

I had to move an old RH6.2 box to WinXP just a couple weeks ago. (/usr was missing - so after the last power outage, it wouldn't come back up, and the wife wanted a windows box in the house.) Oh, man, what a pain. I had less trouble getting Gentoo up and running on a fresh box! (Admittedly, the XP install took less time than Gentoo, but I watched a movie while waiting for Gentoo to finish compiling the core, and had a couple days to do other things while X/KDE compiled.)

First, the box couldn't boot off that CD. Had to install NT4 first, just to get Windows at all.

NT4 didn't recognise the network card, so I had no network. XP install wouldn't work without SP3. Back to the gentoo box, download SP3, burn to CD.

Apply SP3.

Insert XP CD again. Every once in a while, XP would stop to ask me more questions (why couldn't they ask these questions all at once?).

Eventually, got to a working system, installed more stuff, all was fine. Lost track of the number of reboots, though. Gentoo only had two: one to run from the LiveCD, and the second to run from the hard disk. (OS/2 ... now that had a pathetic number of reboots - but at least you didn't need to stick around for them after the first reboot - they asked some questions to start, then a bit later it'd reboot, and ask all the rest of the questions, and then reboot a half-dozen or so times, but no more questions.)

I'm not convinced XP is easy to install. I'm betting that if I sat my wife down on a brand new machine with a working CD (thus XP would boot off CD properly), and all the instructions at her fingertips, and I were away for the weekend (so she couldn't ask me questions ;->), she'd actually have an easier time with Gentoo. And THAT is scary.

Mind you, if I did the same to my mother, she'd just freak out without trying anything. There's no such thing as "easy enough" for her. :-)

yeah well would you want to pay for m$

[mikek3332002]

It makes perfect sense!!

With windows licenes costing about $300 for a couple of processors

With the total cost it would be more powerful to get linux and spend the left over increasing its performance.

One Supercomputer?

[msbsod]

Are these individual supercomputers? BlueGene comes with 131072 processors. Is this one (1) computer? Or 131072? If this is not one computer, then what does list tell us? That 131072 processors are faster than 1 processor?

(The top 6 are all from the US - followed by Japan and Europe.)

Re:One Supercomputer?

[Wesley Felter]

The definition of "supercomputer" these days seems to be "a collection of hardware that can run an MPI job". So BlueGene/L is a cluster of 64K computers, but it counts as one supercomputer.

Re:One Supercomputer?

[Kadin2048]

Fairly good question. I'm not sure where you start calling something a "computer" and where you fall off into the grey area of "computational network" or "cluster" or "grid computing system." After all, isn't SETI@Home a pretty massive computer? By some (very loose) definition it should be.

I think most people consider a computer to be something that, at some level, runs a single operating system (which then can abstract other OSes on top of itself), or perhaps is capable of addressing a single logical range of main memory (although this might not be a good definition either).

I haven't read the article yet to see if they give their definition, but it does seem as if the line between 'this is a computer' and 'this is a bunch of computers working together' is fairly blurry, and perhaps where one draws it is completely arbitrary.

the scoop

[SebNukem]

Looking at this chart http://www.top500.org/lists/2005/11/l/Operating_Sy stem it actually appears that the OS ran on all system are:
- Linux: 72.2%
- Max OS: 1.0%
- Others 4.4%
- UNIX and Linux: everything else (~22%)

So it appears that Linux/UNIX* runs on about 95% of all super computers. The Story headline should have been:
Linux Claims Almost All Supercomputers Spots

What a scoop.

*Linux,UNIX, what's the difference really?

The fifth supercomputer was an Amiga

[wildzeke]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga

Re:Oh but they are

[Sycraft-fu]

I'm just pointing out that there is a big "Linux on everything" movement to the grandparent. He has a misperception that I've seen before that Windows people are all about marketshare and Linux people are all about the OS. In truth there's both kinds on both sides.

However you can't dismiss the evangilists for Linux if for no other reason than that they work hard to be the voice for Linux most people hear and to push their viewpoint. Notice that my orignal post got modded offtopic and flamebait. It's in no way offtopic, it's a direct response to the post above it. It's not that the first post was on topic and mine isn't, it's that the Linux evangilists, of which there are many on this site, like what he had to say but not what I have to say.

At any rate I don't have a problem either way, if Linux does make a move for market dominance I think it'll have to change in ways that fix most of the problems I have with it, and the lack of software availability problem will be self solving. If Linux remains small, I'll use it when convenient and not otherwise. I just want to try and clear up the misconception that Linux users don't care about marketshare. SOME don't, some care about it more than almost anything.

Japanese SUPER HYPER MEGA EFFICIENT ENGINEERING

[garrett714]

I find it funny that the US's challenger to the Earth Simulator came out 3 years later, used almost twice as many processors, and only has a slight performance advantage.

6) Sandia National Laboratories
United States Red Storm Cray XT3, 2.0 GHz
Cray Inc. #Processors: 10880 Year: 2005 Rmax: 36190 Rpeak: 43520

7) The Earth Simulator Center
Japan Earth-Simulator
NEC #Processors: 5120 Year: 2002 Rmax: 35860 Rpeak: 40960

Re:Oh but they are

[somersault]

"Microsoft really does make a fine user OS." err.. I'm not a maaaassive linux fanboy as I use Windows at home and work, and have only occasionally flirted with Linux.. but even though Windows is more dumbed down than Linux, there are still plenty of things in it that your average user wont just understand without you teaching them about it first. Most people, if Linux was the only system in the world, would be able to learn to use Linux fine. It's just that M$ is so pervasive that users are so used to it, and we all know that it's one of the worst, yet best marketed OSs ever (and I can say that truthfully without actually thinking of a system that is worse, having used AmigaOS and MacOS a lot in my younger days). I think that most normal people are becoming 'geekier' all the time anyway, eg learning to fileshare to swap mp3s etc, everyone uses email/the internet.. there must be a way to get a better option out there for people without necessarily losing functionality etc. Windows is slooooooowly becoming more reliable and usable anyway, and more OSS is being converted to it, so at least people can start to migrate to things like OpenOffice as a start to getting into Open Source. If people get used to things like FireFox, the GIMP and OO.org , then they're going to start finding Linux more familiar without even thinking about it. I know that's a small example, but the more stuff that is converted over, the easier it will be for someone to switch over to Linux in the end (and the same goes for porting good professional apps, such as CAD apps, over to Linux).