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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. Re:One Supercomputer? by Kadin2048 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  2. the scoop by SebNukem · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  3. Japanese SUPER HYPER MEGA EFFICIENT ENGINEERING by garrett714 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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