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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."
It may be a niche market but what a market it is. Rock on Linux!
Macs aren't in the top five.
That warms my soul.
...four out of five IT professionals recommend Linux.
MOD THE TROLL DOWN!!!
Our plan is working -- GET THE FACTS!
These aren't off the shelf desktops.
What else would you expect them to run, windows ME?
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
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
When will Google add themselves to the list? (I know, they don't qualify... and they don't want to tell people how many beige boxes they have...)
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.'"
A resurgence in Intel-based machines after their push for increased performance per watt. Power efficiency is right on the list of those who plan the building of supercomputers, right aside performance per dollar.
Today, the supercomputing market. Tomorrow, the desktop market. Down with M$! Linux for the future!!1
With all the tiny inperfections and debates about the developtment processes that are wildly talked about in the tech media it's still remarkable that a system that can do embedded to desktop to server to supercluster systems ( and all variations in between ) in all areas and still keeps on growing and growing on all fronts.
It is not a niche product, It's the only OS that has any momentum at all at this time.
Happy happy !.
Retep Vosnul.
Does someone have a source that tells what OS these things run? I'm not seeing it in either article.
-- Moderation in all things, exceptions to all rules --
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.
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.)
But our supercomputer, System X is the top supercomputer in academia! :-D
(Man, it's already been slashdotted!)
-Acercanto
You can have only two of the following
three qualities when developing a product:
cheap, fast or good. You can produce something
cheap and fast, but it won't be good,
good and fast, but it won't be cheap,
good and cheap, but it won't be fast.
You can have only two of the following three qualities when developing a product: cheap, fast or good.
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!
Well this dosen't come as much of a suprise to me. Obviously if you're looking for the best computer you will use linux. The only reason people use Microsoft is because they are more familiar with it.
Visit Tevlog
We can rule out top500.org's web server...
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...
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?
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.
that may be so... but 9 out of 10 microsoft surveys clearly point to linux not being ready for prime time.
and how many any software from Microsoft (OS, Apps, program lang, etc?)
http://www.hawknest.com/
Slashdot > Linux
??? > Slashdot
Lemme reiterate, A SUPERCOMPUTER RANKING SITE WAS SLASHDOTTED!!!!! w00t!
Given that their server has been slashdotted.
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.
Really? That's funny. I thought I heard otherwise when we visited IBM's supercomputer lab last month, but you must be right. This is Slashdot after all. You obviously have some insight knowledge none of us others have. So, would you care to enlighten us and tell us what is the OS? Yeah right - I thought so.
"With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, there would not be an Itanium today," [an analyst at Illuminata] said.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
que the linux/amd fanboy bashings of WINTEL!!! ;-)
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
Perhaps its not ready for the mass market who dont know why linux is better, and would rather have 50 comercial programs (not all of the illegal spyware) all just go ahead and force themselves memory resident as soon as the desktop boots. oh thats right, linux isnt as good for the 'corporations' that want to load first on your computer and because the sole reason for purchasing your expensive hardware is simply so company X can fill your "startup folder" with their junk (if only they simply used the startup folder (perhaps after asking) instead of the rootkit/registry maul that passes for an install these days under the windows "operating" "system")
;)
look if something as big and mainstream as "steam" _must_ load ~50meg as soon as I boot, reducing a sub min boot to a couple of min of grinding. I just no longer give a fuck about windows. Linux can be totally understood, from "Linux from scratch" right on up.. CLI rox, and with modern conveniences like intelligent autocompletion and emacs-navigation keys you can save time and be more expressive and effective than ever. oh and if you want a gui try enlightenment gnome or kde they're well established, or say enlightenment etc..
gentoo might take a while to install but you'll save time after not needing to install windows oh on about the 3rd windows reinstall you aviod. which should only take a few months..
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
May I suggest the following paper:
J. E. Moreira, G. Almási, C. Archer, R. Bellofatto, P. Bergner, J. R. Brunheroto, M. Brutman, J. G. Castaños, P. G. Crumley, M. Gupta, T. Inglett, D. Lieber, D. Limpert, P. McCarthy, M. Megerian, M. Mendell, M. Mundy, D. Reed, R. K. Sahoo, A. Sanomiya, R. Shok, B. Smith, and G. G. Stewart: Blue Gene/L programming and operating environment.
Summary: It's not all Linux.
In fact, here is the most relevent passage from the article:
"hkjh ojlkj gnnnnn uuummmm nnnneh hgggg h=nehhh emmmm nehh mmmneh" Joey says: "Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!"
-- mmmmmng eurgh
Where does it say that its definatly very NOT linux?
Yeah the Blue Gene running Linux thing is a bit overstated. According to this article from Newsfactor, "only 1,000 of the nodes will be powered by Linux, while the rest will use specialized software to power the machine." I expect that the 'specialized software' is z/OS or something similar, or custom code specific to the application or problem being solved.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Did or did not 640K was declared as the "ultimate" what a user would want? Why on earth would a virus need a supercomputer? Worms just get confused in all the Visual Basic for the Blind code and can't find their way out. No need for Super Computers -- now, if you are talking about a super worm and worm pandemic, that's a different story. I've seen them on TV, they come of them soil and devour you. Like it says in the Book. Which is so complicated that it must 'ave been 'ritten by an iteligen desiner, no less, I know that.
This proves that Apple is #1 in super computing.
As hard as a rock, and as dumb as a brick.
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. 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. 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. Of course non are willing to change Linux in the ways needed for this, but they state it as a goal all the same.
Some people don't care about Linux market share, but many do, including most of Slashdot and some very notable figures. I've often been berated because I won't switch, and told my reasons for refusing to do so are invalid.
could withstand the mighty power of a Slashdotting!
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"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Does it run....
D'oh.
Image a Beowolf cluster...
D'oh.
DYWYPI?
...the one in the top 5 that is not running Linux is ASCI Purple, and it is running AIX. In case you haven't heard of it, AIX is a version of Unix developed by IBM:
IBM AIX 5L
Wikipedia: AIX Operating System
Imagine... a Beowulf cluster of these... ;).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga
Am I the only one looking at the top 5 going "USA! USA! USA! USA!" with the Hulk Hogan theme song "I am a real American!" playing in my head? Probably. Think the Japanese aren't planning a new super-duper computer that will accurately predict the precise location Godzilla will destroy?
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
Well done linux, i yearn for the day when the headlines read
Female Linux Users Claim 4 of the Top 5 Supermodel Finalists
That link for AIX points to IBM's website.
Try here instead.
I hate it when you long-haired smellies pass off false information for truth.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
Following your argument:
Oh, vector cpus are SO boring. You just put some more execution units on the cpu, add some more memory channels. Just takes die-space and board layers, thus money, not invention or innovation.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
You jest, but Microsoft actually does have a horse in this race.
Breakfast served all day!
In other news, Windows claims 2,953,614,207 of the 3,000,000,000 desktop computer spots.
Looking further, it seems that the top ten all run some flavour of UNIX and seven of them run Linux.
Oh well, what the hell...
I was working at SGI in 1999 when they made their Itanium/Linux move. A lot of customers (and employees for that matter) would have liked SGI to port its version of Unix, Irix, to the Itanium. But that was just too expensive. Instead, SGI promised to continue selling the MIPS/Irix Origin line, in addition to the Linux/Itanium Altix line. So Irix is still alive — as a legacy system. If you check the Top 500 list you'll find several Altix systems but not a single Origin system.
If you look up how the top500 benchmark, and most of the others, slapping together a heap of boxes doesn't get you anything. To actually get a decent score on parallel DP linpack, or simulation codes used as benchmarks, you need a fast, very low latency interconnect between the nodes, excellent synchronization, and fast disk access.
Even the allegedly "off the shelf" systems contain an awful lot of not off the shelf hardware. Case in point would be PNNL's Itanium cluster http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/capabs/mscf.shtml/ (at 1000 or so nodes). At SC2003 I chatted with people I know from there, and they mentioned that they had four (4) Quadrics http://www.quadrics.com/ interconnect cards Per Node, plus extra switches, in order to get the bandwidth up high enough. Even a cheap cluster will add Myrinet (at about $1500/node when the switch is factored in), and start worrying about topology after the first few dozen nodes are installed.
There are clusters (basically networks of workstations), and then there are supercomputers.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
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
"I'm not sure"
"I think"
"I haven't read the article yet"
This guy has no information to contribute. It's just uninformed ass licking.
I've been thrilled with Drupal, which is open source. It's both easy to use and powerful. You can take a look at my site, which is hosted through 101sitehosting for $29.99/year. I would have had to pay more than that each month to get Slash hosting.
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.
Here are the top 500 systems sorted by efficiency:
NEC Vector: 89.9%
Cray Vector: 84.0%
Hitachi Vector: 82.2%
Itanium: 80.8%
AMD x86-64: 74.0%
POWER: 72.8%
Alpha: 71.2%
Intel x86-64: 60.2%
PA-RISC: 54.0%
Intel x86: 53.2%
and lucky last,
SPARC: 49.6%
Interesting things to note:
1) After all these years, vector machines are still on top
2) "The best of the rest" are actually Itanium (IA-64) machines
3) Efficiency is important, because for real-world applications (weather forecasting, earthquake simulation or whatever) you are likely to see even lower efficiencies. If a machine can't even run linpack (dense linear algebra) well, it might really hit a brick wall when it comes time to solving more difficult problems.
4) These stats were made by visiting the top500's "stats" page, dividing the aggregate Rmax/Rpeak for each processor family, and then sorting them.
much in the same way as my computer that has a dedicated videocard that does not run linux.. I still say that my computer is running linux though. (I might even say the same about my window box, but then I'll get modded down)
Google runs on whatever is cheapest. Today Google is probably big enough to tell a motherboard designer what to design.
About 5 years ago, Google ran on about 8000 beige boxes. Each one had a Celeron CPU and two IDE drives.
- _______________Count____Share_%
- Linux__________361______72.20_%
- SuSE_Linux_ES8___1_______0.20_%
- Redhat_ES3_______4_______0.80_%
- HP_Unix_(HP-UX)_31_______6.20_%
- MacOS_X__________5_______1.00_%
- Solaris__________4_______0.80_%
- UNICOS__________14_______2.80_%
- Super-UX_________4_______0.80_%
- HI-UX/MPP________2_______0.40_%
- AIX_____________44_______8.80_%
- Tru64_UNIX_______4_______0.80_%
- Paragon_OS_______1_______0.20_%
- SuSE_Linux_ES9___5_______1.00_%
- UNICOS/Linux_____1_______0.20_%
- CNK/Linux_______18_______3.60_%
- Redhat_Linux_____1_______0.20_%
- Totals______500________100_%
honk if you hate the lameness filter!How much electricty has been wasted by all of those Unix workstations kept on 24 hours a day unused in schools and offices because the users don't want to wait for a boot up disk check even though the computer is not being used?
linux better watch out
http://news.com.com/Gates+to+tout+Microsofts+supe
Get your torrents...
The article was about blog software, of which Drupal is an example. Why was my post moderated as being off-topic? FYI, I don't get a kickback from my hosting provider for mentioning their name.
I can assure you, we didn't do it because it was indeed too expensive.
I'm also pretty sure there's no Irix on a PIII, but hey, there's a lot of odd looking stuff in the basement, so who knows.
No, not in the top 5 any longer. But those Mac clusters that are in the top 500 give by far the most bang for the the buck. See for yourself on this list. You want to look at the 'R-max MFlop / dollar' column. Because of this fact I personally don't understand why there aren't much more Mac clusters being built.
These days about half the supercomputers simply use Gigabit Ethernet top500 site. And yes, that's commodity. Dual Gig Ethernet ports can be found on even $700 off the shelf servers these days.
Worrying abou topology is extremely importing. Spending your money on $1500/node interconnects probably isn't. The highest-performance guys certainly don't use such mid-range interconnects as you described (that perform about like gigE), but reather build their own proprietary interconnects (the dark blue on the chart I linked).
what else? Linux the toaster??? Linux the car???
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.
It's not z/OS, it's a custom kernel which provides the absolute minimum facilities required.
z/OS doesn't even run on PPC-compatible hardware...
I guess today is a passable day to die.
4 of the top 5 use Linux? I think you mean "The Top 3 are from the same vendor, one that is known for supporting Linux". This is more a victory for IBM. Linux is just along for the ride.
Virginia Tech's cluster of G5 Macs used to be in the Top 5. If lowest cost per teraflop is your figure of merit, Virgina Tech's rig ranked #1 at the time... that may still be true, not sure.
Currently, G5 Mac clusters hold the #15 and #20 spots on the Top 500 list.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The moment when Saline Dione sung that phrase in her musick veedio, Leonardo DiCrapio was:
Getting the Captain's Log shucked by the beaver,
Governing the transaction at the cargo bay,
Stuffing the Turkey with anglo-food cake,
Exercising drawing rights on the well,
Feeding the pussycat some cock-jerky,
Spongebobbing her squidward,
NUMA NUMA in her puma,
It is safe to ascertain that EVERYONE that boards the iTanic, will be fucked in the ears by Saline Dione and in the rears by Intel.