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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."
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.
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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?