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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."

174 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. niche market? by OffTheLip · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    1. Re:niche market? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yes, but is it ready for the desktop?

      (Hint to the OSS-monkeys: the answer is not "Of course; it has at least 157 different window managers and 476 different toolkits, each prettier than the other, so it must be ready!!!1!!")

    2. Re:niche market? by miffo.swe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    3. Re:niche market? by Pantero+Blanco · · Score: 1

      I'd say Ubuntu's on par with Windows XP on user-friendliness (newbies aren't confused by a seven-item list of window managers to choose from, for example), so the only issues left are compatibility (which has been improving quickly) and exposure.

    4. Re:niche market? by nottoogeeky · · Score: 1

      Nope. I can install XP easy, but the Ubuntu cd i have here won't install and won't work out the partitions. When i installed mandrake for the first time, took me three weeks just go get my alcatel 330 working. Im an advanced computer user windows/mac......and i still cannot use linux. It's not ready for the desktop.

    5. Re:niche market? by nottoogeeky · · Score: 1

      More Web Design/Development, Coding PHP, MySql, HMTL, XML. Along with Dreamweaver for layout. I would say that's a little more than copying and pasting!!!

    6. Re:niche market? by nottoogeeky · · Score: 1, Interesting

      damn right!!! I'm all for linux taking over xp/osx. But they have to listen to the desktop market instead of flaming them all. I like fluffy eye candy and movin things!!!

    7. Re:niche market? by DogDude · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.
    8. Re:niche market? by Tanktalus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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. :-)

    9. Re:niche market? by masklinn · · Score: 1
      I use it as a desktop and find it very usable
      Asa still disagrees
      --
      "The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
    10. Re:niche market? by name773 · · Score: 2, Funny

      everyone should use the kernel... otherwise their system won't run.

      you need some persistence at first, but once you get good at finding howtos and following directions it gets easier.

    11. Re:niche market? by bersl2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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".

    12. Re:niche market? by dreadclown · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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...

    13. Re:niche market? by budgenator · · Score: 1

      I've got a couple of pieces of hardware, such as my DVD drive, that when in their original windows box won't work. Dell is spending a lot of money on warrentee parts that are hopelessly broken in Windows, that just work in Linux; often they tell customer to just chuck, rather than pay for returns.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    14. Re:niche market? by name773 · · Score: 1

      oh, i don't really care what the average joe uses. i'm just trying to say that it's not so hard once you get the hang of how to get the hang of things.

    15. Re:niche market? by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 1

      Well I'd installed a number of windows OSes, and a few versions of several distros, but most of the people I took Operating Systems with were windows users. Everyone else thought that the install labs were going to be easy for windows and hard for linux. Wrong. Getting network printers working, and file servers, and setting up users accounts, etc..., starting with a set of CDs and an unformated hard drive was easier for almost everybody using linux than windows. These were computer science juniors and seniors, not exactly without a clue...

    16. Re:niche market? by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 1

      You know, wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft came out with a set of man pages instead of that piece of... code... they call MS Help? It is possible to *quickly* get the necessary information to do basic things with man pages. Not that I think the format of MS Help is so bad (it looks just like gnome help, or java help) although I do think that the phrase "compiled HTML" is at least somehow contradictary. The actual ad hoc assortment of text, and dismal indexing, makes it possible to have done something 6 months ago and not know the secret MS combo of terms to search for to find it again. Rumor has it documentation is so bad for windows to support the third party book market.

    17. Re:niche market? by NetRAVEN5000 · · Score: 4, Insightful
      "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."

      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
    18. Re:niche market? by dago · · Score: 1

      That's what these cluster are used for.

      They are running the 74372 variations of window makager / toolkits.

      --
      #include "coucou.h"
    19. Re:niche market? by EsbenMoseHansen · · Score: 1
      Nope. I can install XP easy, but the Ubuntu cd i have here won't install ...

      So? Gentoo installed like a breeze on my new hardware, but windows XP could not. It kept complaining that no hard disk were present, even though there were 2 perfectly find SATA disks present --- I believe SATA is the standard these days, at least I didn't get out of my way to get these disks. It then proceded to ask me for a windows driver, which I presumably had on the a CD, on a diskette, which I did not. As I don't actually own a diskette drive, I gave up after a week or so fighting this.

      I have since heard of a few more people having exactly this issue. Also some that did not with a similar setup. *shrug*

      I even went as far as borrow a set up service pack 2 (?) install CDs just to try if that would work.. no change.

      In conclusion, I won't be playing a game one of my friends helped develop, but other than that, I don't miss windows anyway. Gentoo is much simpler to use, at least for an old mathematician like me. And now that my work laptop is also pure linux (RHEL4xx, a customized version i think) I am happy with my setup

      The point is, from anecdotal evidence, windows is just as hard to install as linux. That is, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Unless someone cares to do a real statistical analysis, that is as close as we will ever get.

      --
      Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
  2. well duh by scenestar · · Score: 5, Funny

    These aren't off the shelf desktops.

    What else would you expect them to run, windows ME?

    --
    perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
    1. Re:well duh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      No, Windows CEMeNT

    2. Re:well duh by Eightyford · · Score: 3, Informative

      These aren't off the shelf desktops. What else would you expect them to run, windows ME?

      HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, SCO UNIX, Mac OS X, free/open/netBSD...? Palm OS?

      --
      Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
    3. Re:well duh by vhogemann · · Score: 1

      Well,

      One migth think that Microsoft would pursue a position among the top 100. After all, they have a clustering solution, dont they?

      --
      ---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
    4. Re:well duh by SoloFlyer2 · · Score: 1

      That must be what they are running on their webservers... SLASHDOTTED! :)

      http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/c4d983f435b904443 de279fee8e0ea48/index.html

      --
      "I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
    5. Re:well duh by ZakuSage · · Score: 1

      Clearly they should be running SCO Unixware.

    6. Re:well duh by Jake73 · · Score: 1

      Do you have any idea how much a 1,024-processor version of Windows XP Pro costs??

    7. Re:well duh by khellendros1984 · · Score: 1

      I can see the headline now: PalmOS has jumped to number 3 OS in use on multiprocessor supercomputers!....Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Palm V's....

      --
      It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
    8. Re:well duh by Hugonz · · Score: 1

      Well that's what you'd normally say. But the MS sales rep would keep telling you that they hace great clustering solutions. See, Windows Server (NT) is a general purpose operating system, just like Linux. Linux is not intended for supercomputers either..

    9. Re:well duh by ozbird · · Score: 1

      What else would you expect them to run, windows ME? Windows XMP.

    10. Re:well duh by erikharrison · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Interestingly, none of those are the OS used in the only top 5 computer not running Linux.

      It's AIX.

    11. Re:well duh by The_Dougster · · Score: 1
      Linux is not intended for supercomputers either.

      That's pretty subjective. If you're talking about "the Linux kernel" then while it was originally designed to just be a monolithic unix kernel clone for x86 machines, over the recent years, big boys like IBM have made some significant contributions to the source tree to make Linux an effective kernel on big iron.

      If you're talking about Linux as in "GNU Userland" there's no reason it can't be run on big iron. You can probably build quite a lot of the GNU utilities against a non-Linux kernel and generic libc without serious problems. Personally, I like the GNU versions better than proprietary ones just because of the more consistent command line switch syntax and usually the extra features.

      I know about zero concerning supercomputers though. Presumably you would access them using a graphics terminal of some type. Whatever the underlying OS might be, the most important thing for a supercomputer seems to be the ability to run massively parallel programs to solve huge matrix problems and otherwise process massive amounts of data quickly. No matter what OS they run, as long as you have your special FORTRAN compiler (or whatever it is they use on those things) to write super-programs, I don't see why Linux isn't at least as good a choice as any others.

      --
      Clickety Click ...
    12. Re:well duh by borsi · · Score: 1

      These aren't off the shelf desktops. What else would you expect them to run, windows ME?


      HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, SCO UNIX, Mac OS X, free/open/netBSD...? Palm OS?


      Hmmm... OS/400, perhaps... everything for user friendliness :)

      --
      For Aiur!!!
  3. Hooray for Linux! by Elrac · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Hooray for Linux! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I hate to break it to you, but the term "Unwashed masses" couldn't describe the Linux user base more accurately. =)

    2. Re:Hooray for Linux! by Decaff · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Actually, it doesn't show that at all. Supercomputing is a very specialised niche use of hardware. Generally, this sort of software wants the operating system to get out of the way as much as possible and allow the fastest possible access to memory and processors and (depending on the situation) I/O systems. In the past major supercomputer applications have required very little operating system functionality to back them up.

      There is little comparison between specialised numerical supercomputing and general multi-processor mainframe use, which requires concurrent multiuser access to app servers, general filesystems, databases etc. This is where older OSes such as IBM operating systems and Solaris work very well, and where Linux is now making inroads.

      It is rather like comparing a formula one racing car to a truck. I agree that Linux is suited to both purposes, but working well in one environment does not indicate usefulness in another.

    3. Re:Hooray for Linux! by networkBoy · · Score: 1

      In fact, IIRC earlier supercomputing apps did away with the OS concept entirly. The application was written for the particular target hardware and ran on the hardware directly, without the abstraction an OS provides. While this would eek out every possible drop of performance, it sure is hell for portability, which is why the current applications expect at least a minimal os to field the basic functionality.

      Come to think of it, what most apps want is a souped up BIOS with some smarts and a filesystem.
      -nB

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
  4. Itanic, we hardly knew ye by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.'"
    1. Re:Itanic, we hardly knew ye by Hal_Porter · · Score: 1

      Yup, it's an interesting architecture, but the sales are unbelievably bad

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/30/opteron_it anium_sales_q2/

            The Itanium ecosystem is as unhealthy as ever with HP totally dominating
            sales. HP moved 4,789 of the 5,665 boxes shipped in the second quarter,
            earning $250m in revenue. That total is roughly equivalent to the RISC
            server business done by IBM or Sun in one week.

      Ouch. I thought it would at least manage to sell as many chips as POWER or SPARC, but it's an order of magnitude worse. The sad thing is that the people marketing it managed to kill off Alpha and Mips before this happened - both Compaq and SGI are too far along that process to revive them when Itanium finally dies. Looks like the whole world will end up on x86-64 after all.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  5. I expect to see... by JrbM689 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:I expect to see... by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      I expect to see AMD continue to make lower-power-consumption processors than intel does, especially since even the normal desktop Athlon 64 consumes about the same amount of power as a Pentium M - even before you add in the chipset consumption. You have to do that to get a good comparison, however, since Athlon 64's memory controller is onboard, and Pentium M's isn't.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:I expect to see... by diegocgteleline.es · · Score: 1

      A resurgence in Intel-based machines after their push for increased performance per watt

      Yeah. Intel still has to show one non-laptop (ie: servers and desktops) CPU which is not the n 1 power-hungry CPU in its class; and other companies are also (obviously) working in making their CPUs less power hungry (see: future versions of the amd cpus, the low-power PPCs), still Intel/Apple fanboys are already sure that Intel will be the best at performance per watt numbers

      It's amazing what the Jobs' intel switch has been able to do to the Intel's public "face". They're WAY behind of amd and IBM still some people will think that that will change just because the intel ceo and Jobs said it. Maybe it will be true, but from the facts I (and anyone who looks at the facts) would say that it's AMD who is going to top the supercomputers list not intel.

    3. Re:I expect to see... by AnotherBlackHat · · Score: 1

      Athlon 64 consumes about the same amount of power as a Pentium M - even before you add in the chipset consumption.


      I'd like to see the tech. specs for that claim.
      Last I checked, the power consumption of the Pentium M was much lower than the Athlon 64.
      Even with the extra chips, it's on the order of 30 watts vs. 80 watts, but a "fair" comparison isn't really possible since the M isn't a 64 bit processor.

      -- Should you believe authority without question?
    4. Re:I expect to see... by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Well, I went back and looked and now I can't find what I was previously reading. Maybe it was the original Pentium-M core? When I looked, the A64 ate a few more watts than the P-M but again, there was the memory controller, and when you added in the chipset, they were about the same.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    5. Re:I expect to see... by masklinn · · Score: 1

      Duh, idle Pentium-M feature a 27W TDP while A64 are all well above 60W TDP...

      On the other hand, low-power Opterons and Turion64 (AMD's mobile A64s) get as low as 25W TDP.

      Oh, and BTW some A64/socket939 chipsets get hot as fucks, check the running temperature of a nForce4 chip, mine currently checks 47C while my A64 3000+ runs a cool 35C (and I'm not using SLI, which makes the nF4 get even hotter)...

      --
      "The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
    6. Re:I expect to see... by Bloater · · Score: 1

      > Duh, idle Pentium-M feature a 27W TDP while A64 are all well above 60W TDP...

      Not to say that AMD64 are as low as Pentium-M, TDP is meaningless, it is the manufacturer's guide to system integrators what cooling to provide so that the CPU doesn't have to be throttled too much, but it does not say how much power the CPU uses. Turion64 ML CPUs have a TDP of 35W but measure (including chipsets - which is necessary to compare apples to apples) lower than Pentium M.

    7. Re:I expect to see... by The_Dougster · · Score: 1
      A resurgence in Intel-based machines...

      Intel sure seems like they have shot themselves in the foot. They worked for years making sure that Intel X86 was king of the hill, then they tried to switch to Itanium, and AMD blew past them in the meantime. Intel has been still selling well just because of inertia, but it looks like the market is starting to jump over to AMD now finally.

      Personally, I don't care. In fact I'd rather be using something with a sensible machine programming scheme and more grokkable architecture. PowerPC, ARM and Sparc are basically the three remaining competitors to X86. Mips, PA-RISC, Alpha, and others are still around, but I don't forsee them making much of a comeback, maybe Mips.

      You're probably right if you consider X86-64 to be "Intel-based." It would be cool to see a supercomputer based on something like ARM if they could add FPU's and Vector processors, but by then it probably wouldn't be an ARM anymore.

      Sun and IBM probably have the best hope of making non-x86 processors which might be viable for supercomputers. Especially IBM.

      --
      Clickety Click ...
  6. Re:Google = the world's biggest supercomputer by Tenareth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They regularly publish how many beige boxes they have...

    --
    This sig is the express property of someone.
  7. Source? by PMoonlite · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 --
    1. Re:Source? by jbellows_20 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, if Sony hadn't went off and got caught they would have the largest supercomputer and it would be running Microsft Windows!

    2. Re:Source? by cnkeller · · Score: 1

      In the case of Columbia, it's listed right on the systems page.

      --

      there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots

    3. Re:Source? by NetRAVEN5000 · · Score: 1
      "Well, if Sony hadn't went off and got caught they would have the largest supercomputer and it would be running Microsft Windows!"

      In order for it to be considered a supercomputer all the boxes generally have to be in the same building and owned by the same company. A large network of computers that were overtaken by a Skynet-like, we-control-your-PC-now piece of malware such as Sony's rootkit doesn't count for a "supercomputer".

      --
      www.linuxpenguin.net
    4. Re:Source? by Sique · · Score: 1

      Says who?

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
  8. yeah well would you want to pay for m$ by mikek3332002 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:yeah well would you want to pay for m$ by ajlitt · · Score: 1

      Of course. Because, you know, the only two operating systems that a supercomputer could possibly run are Linux and Windows.

    2. Re:yeah well would you want to pay for m$ by jtolds · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:yeah well would you want to pay for m$ by jtolds · · Score: 1

      I'm sorry, that comment should have been in response to two parents up.

    4. Re:yeah well would you want to pay for m$ by jmv · · Score: 1

      While Windows probably wouldn't make sense for many other reasons, price is probably the least of the issues. Given how expensive the interconnects are in these machines, 300$ CPU is negligeable.

      --
      Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
    5. Re:yeah well would you want to pay for m$ by ZakuSage · · Score: 2, Informative

      Well yes, but they could easilly go for other free options other then Linux. FreeBSD, for example.

    6. Re:yeah well would you want to pay for m$ by mikefe · · Score: 1

      Well yes, but they could easilly go for other free options other then Linux. FreeBSD, for example.

      Please point me to the papers showing better scaling for SMP and NUMA in FreeBSD when compared to Linux 2.6

      --
      There: Something at a specific location.
      Their: Owned by someone.
      Please make sure your english compiles.
    7. Re:yeah well would you want to pay for m$ by NetRAVEN5000 · · Score: 1
      "Given how expensive the interconnects are in these machines, 300$ CPU is negligeable."

      Given that many of these machines have over 4,000 CPUs. . . it's really not all that negligible. Saving over $1,000,000 isn't what I'd call negligible - it'd buy you quite a few extra CPUs. Or quite a few extra gigabytes of memory, or whatever else you might need/want in there. Sure, maybe there's other areas that are more costly but saving that much money by ditching MS is something to consider.

      --
      www.linuxpenguin.net
    8. Re:yeah well would you want to pay for m$ by jmv · · Score: 1

      Oh, I'm not saying anyone in the right mind would ever consider Windows for a supercomputer. Just that in this particular case, the money itself isn't that much of an issue. If an OS costs you 300$/CPU and improved the performance by just 10%, it would most likely be worth it. Of course, Windows would probably do the opposite, but that's another thing.

      --
      Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
  9. One Supercomputer? by msbsod · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.)

    1. Re:One Supercomputer? by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:One Supercomputer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      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.

    3. 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."
    4. Re:One Supercomputer? by msbsod · · Score: 1

      So all I have to do is run MPI and Linpack (or better Lapack) on a bunch of computers and that makes them altogether a supercomputer?

    5. Re:One Supercomputer? by imsabbel · · Score: 1

      It is more or less arbitrary.
      For example, Seti at home _could_ qualify as a supercomputer... But it would HORRIBLY suck at 99.999% of all problems because of limited node to node bandwith and latency.

      --
      HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
    6. Re:One Supercomputer? by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2, Informative

      As far as the Top500 is concerned, I think the answer is yes. (And this explains why SETI@HOME does not count as a supercomputer for the purpose of compiling the Top500 list.)

    7. Re:One Supercomputer? by Muad · · Score: 1

      The definition of supercomputer is " a computer that costs more than $1,000,000" - you will find it in any textbook.

      --
      --- "I didn't think anyone would understand it" -Prof. Bob Muller
    8. Re:One Supercomputer? by imsabbel · · Score: 1

      If the endresult is FAST, yes.
      You dont need more than a few 100k Of computer equipment to get into the top500 list.

      --
      HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
    9. Re:One Supercomputer? by slavemowgli · · Score: 1

      Actually, I think there is a difference that goes beyond the fact that nobody ever ran an MPI benchmark on seti@home. It's hard to pinpoint exactly, but suffice to say that I think it's the same reason why the Internet is not a LAN, if you catch my drift.

      --
      quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
    10. Re:One Supercomputer? by photon317 · · Score: 1


      The big difference is that the types of multiprocessing you can typically achieve with MPI on a tight-knit cluster is different than what you can achieve with a loose-knit cluster like seti@home. Seti@home, in terms of clusters, has very low bandwidth between nodes, and a very high interconnect latency, making certain tasks infeasibly slow on such a layout. Contrasted against a distributed setup like Set@home, the current gen of Top500 linux clusters tend to have very high bandwidth and very low latency between nodes.

      But for problems which can be reasonably broken up into large chunks with low inter-node communication, obviously, the distributed approach is capable of winning by brute force if enough people throw their PCs at it.

      --
      11*43+456^2
    11. Re:One Supercomputer? by slavemowgli · · Score: 1

      Oh, that definitely. But it'll still be a network of individual machines, not one supercomputer.

      --
      quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
    12. Re:One Supercomputer? by NetRAVEN5000 · · Score: 1
      Seti@Home generally isn't considered a "supercomputer" because each of the client machines work independently. They aren't working together to analyze the same piece of data, each is crunching away at its own record, and the other computers go on without it if one computer isn't done yet. If you turn off the Seti screensaver mid-process the rest of the network keeps on crunching data. However, in a supercomputer the main computer waits for every computer to finish up before it goes on - so if one were to freeze or lose power the whole system would go down.

      At least that's the way I understand it.

      --
      www.linuxpenguin.net
    13. Re:One Supercomputer? by __aanekd3853 · · Score: 1
      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.

      Top500 classifies supercomputers as clusters, constellations, and MPPs (Massively Parallel Processors). BG/L is an MPP. It is obviously not a cluster since a single compute node is not a general-purpose machine. BG/L is specifically intended for massively parallel applications.

      The difference between clusters and constellations is the ratio between the number of nodes (that can either work independently or be clustered) and the number of processors in a node.

      Go to the Sublist generator of Top500 to see what machines belong to which category.

      See, e.g., definitions here

  10. linux? Not exactly. by daknapp · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  11. Fastest Computers? by nnnnnnnn · · Score: 3, Funny

    We can rule out top500.org's web server...

  12. Re:Google = the world's biggest supercomputer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    And where can we exactly find these publishements?

  13. Linux for SuperComputers! by Neptune0z · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:Linux for SuperComputers! by budgenator · · Score: 1

      Does source code access include fix, recompile and install? Can a mere mortal even read that mangled mess of spaghetti?

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    2. Re:Linux for SuperComputers! by NetRAVEN5000 · · Score: 1
      "Can a mere mortal even read that mangled mess of spaghetti?"

      Why would you want to read the kernel code? Maybe certain parts of it to optimize it, but not the whole thing. You'd split it up between the people on the team (if you wanted the whole thing read).

      --
      www.linuxpenguin.net
    3. Re:Linux for SuperComputers! by budgenator · · Score: 1

      The parent was talking about discounted windows licensing and access to the source code in Windows for large scale clusters/super-computers. My understanding is, the windows access to source code is on a "look but don't touch and don't talk" basis. Also I understand that Microsoft is putting conciderable effort into straightening out their code and bring it up to professional standards, de-spaghettizing it in other words.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    4. Re:Linux for SuperComputers! by NetRAVEN5000 · · Score: 1
      "One person can learn the entire theory of UNIX operating systems by reading this 254 page book. UNIX is clear, UNIX is concise, UNIX is a beautiful elegant masterwork. Much of the framework used in every modern OS is present in UNIX 6th edition."

      I'm not the one who said the kernel code was a tangled mess. I'm sure it's very clear and easy to read. But I don't know many people who'd want to sit there and read all of it, unless they're either trying to fix part of it or are trying to learn from it - and I doubt they'd even read the entire thing, they'd probably just pick specific parts having to do with what they're trying to learn/fix.

      IOW I wasn't saying that you can't read or can't understand the kernel code - I was just saying that I, for one, would rather read something else.

      --
      www.linuxpenguin.net
    5. Re:Linux for SuperComputers! by NetRAVEN5000 · · Score: 1

      Oops. It sounded to me like it was talking about the Linux kernel code - AFAIK you're not allowed to fix or recompile the Windows kernel code.

      --
      www.linuxpenguin.net
  14. Re:Google = the world's biggest supercomputer by UnknowingFool · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm sure Google is up there in terms of size, but this list is about performance. Google's computers do searching which is different in terms of processing requirements than raw number crunching like simulating a nuclear explosion. Google also probably wouldn't release any specifications anyway.

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  15. Re:But Virginia Tech is No. 1 in Education!! by ShadowFlyP · · Score: 1

    What does it mean for a product to be "good"? I would say there are four qualities you're looking for in computers: cheap, fast, low-powered/low-heat, high avaliability. "Good" is a product of those four values. Likely, when designing a product you can excel at one of those qualities and perform decently at two others.

  16. Re:I see that... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Apple's customers are like no others -- a rich blend of the most sociologically elite with those seeking elegant, simple computing. ... Unlike users of Intel/Windows computers, a significant portion of Apple's users are active, exploratory, avant-garde and early adopters . The activities they enjoy are unique in the the way that they more often incorporate rich media such as video and music as well as more active prosumer behavior than many more passive Windows [and Linux] users.

    -- MetaFacts, Inc.


    With above-average household income and education levels, the Mac population [is] very attractive [intellectually as well as physically.]

    -- Nielsen/NetRatings (as quoted by C|NET)


  17. Re:Google = the world's biggest supercomputer by thisisauniqueid · · Score: 1

    Ask a real Google employee, and they'll get edgy as soon as you ask questions like that. Also try asking them how many Ph.D.s they hire... There are things they are not supposed to talk about. The mysteriousness of their company is part of their corporate image.

  18. 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?

    1. Re:the scoop by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Linux,UNIX, what's the difference really?

      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.'"
    2. Re:the scoop by SebNukem · · Score: 1

      Of course. I meant Technology-wise.

    3. Re:the scoop by Flwyd · · Score: 1

      MacOS, BSD, Unix... what's the difference?

      --
      Ceci n'est pas une signature.
    4. Re:the scoop by JPriest · · Score: 1
      Linux,UNIX, what's the difference really

      About 10 million line of code.

      --
      Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
    5. Re:the scoop by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Linux has the kitchen sink, and the others don't? It's pretty hard to find a feature in some UNIX that Linux doesn't have; dtrace is the last example I can really think of. On the other hand, you can find numerous features in Linux that aren't in other Unixes.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:the scoop by Fordiman · · Score: 1

      Well, it's not POSIX compliance, nor is it performance or stability. And considering the BSDs, it's not price, so long as you're an individual.

      It ain't ease of use, as they can run the same software. It used to be binary format, but Linux likes ELF now.

      Portability? You can run linux on most anything with a processor, but BSD has certain... requirements.

      --
      110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
    7. Re:the scoop by MagnusDredd · · Score: 1

      shouldn't that be:

      *NIX runs on over 95% of all supercomputers?

    8. Re:the scoop by NetRAVEN5000 · · Score: 1
      Wonder why Windows isn't on there. . .

      "Welcome to the unveiling of the unveiling of the new WTFBBQ Supercomputer! The fastest in the. . ." (whispers) 'Dammit Jim, we've got the BSOD again! Go hit Ctrl-Alt-Del!"

      --
      www.linuxpenguin.net
  19. *yawn* by davmoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:*yawn* by FooAtWFU · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oh, give them some credit. There's a lot of effort and design that goes into organizing such a big mess of supercomputing, keeping everything streamlined, keeping processes on thousands of different processors talking to each other, deciding what to do if one processor decides to fail, et cetera et cetera. There is real work and real innovation present- perhaps not as glamorous or even as useful as faster general-purpose microprocessor cores, but don't sell them short, either.

      --
      The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
    2. Re:*yawn* by greg_barton · · Score: 1

      All you have to do to beat one is build an identical system but add a new processor or two...

      Um...that's the impressive part...

    3. Re:*yawn* by nbert · · Score: 1

      On the one hand it takes a lot of effort and expertise to build such systems, on the other hand both can and have to be bought usually, so I definitely see your point.

      So you could argue that they could slap each other with their wallets instead of building those supercomputers. But first of all it's quite impressive that some entities are willing to invest so much money into computing power. And afterall they are not doing this because it's some kind of game - they believe that they need the processing power. Furthermore money is the dominating aspect in so many fields nowadays (especially those most people assume to be innovation driven): Cars, airplanes, watches or even sports. Just about anything related to reputation is strictly connected to a factor called money. One might argue that a Veyron is just an ordinary car powered by two upper level engines combined to a beast plus some added technology being in use since decades in other fields. What factor makes it possible to assemble such a car? Money! But still many people (even though most of them could never afford it) are fascinated by the concept. Apart from that (right here I'm not comparing cars to supercomputers anymore) they don't even question the idea of haveing a car being able to drive multiple times as fast as your average highway speed limit. They don't even care that they would run out of fuel in minutes at maximum speed. I guess that's just human nature...

      --
      I don't read replies by ACs.
    4. Re:*yawn* by decepetion · · Score: 1

      Adding "a processor or two" is not always as simple as it sounds. Can you say Scalability? Sometimes that 1 processor or 2 falls out of the realm that the compiler, interconnect, or management system has yet to work in. Just upping the size does not always work.

    5. Re:*yawn* by wild_berry · · Score: 1

      The thing that I'm struck by is the efficiency of the systems: that the BlueGene/L system gets around 2GFlops/processor; 6.2 GFlops/proc for ASC/Purple; 5.1 for Columbia; 4.8 for Thunderbird; Red Storm gets 3.6; Earth Simulator, 7.7; MareNostrum, 5.8; Thunder (the highest-ranked Itanium cluster), 4.86; Korean Meteorological Administration's Cray X1E gets an outstanding 15.4GFlops/processor (with due respect to the people at Cray as was); and VTech's XServe's provide around 6GFlops/processor. I suspect that the bandwidth between nodes and the network topology to ensure that data flows smoothly is the hinderance for getting high performance per node in the larger systems.

    6. Re:*yawn* by raxx7 · · Score: 1

      Linpack is not very interconnect sensitive. Despite all the bragging companies make on being number 1, the top500.org are the first to recognize that Linpack is not a proper benchmark, just a quick way to compile a list of the biggest machines on the planet.

      But FLOPS/CPU numbers come primarly from cpu design, clock speed and memory bandwidth.
      For example, among the scalar CPUs, some can issue 2 double precision floating point ops per clock cycle, some can issue 4. And they run at different frequencies, from 700 MHz to 2.2GHz+.
      The vector based machines can perform a lot of operations per cycle, but they tend to run at low clock frequencies.
      For example, the Earth Simulator's processor (based on NEC SX-6) can perform 16 but it runs at 500 MHz.

  20. still not ready for prime time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    that may be so... but 9 out of 10 microsoft surveys clearly point to linux not being ready for prime time.

    1. Re:still not ready for prime time by WindBourne · · Score: 1

      Since they are MS surveys, is it not 11 out of 10 surveys that prefer Windows?

      --
      I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  21. Re:Google = the world's biggest supercomputer by thisisauniqueid · · Score: 1

    Doesn't matter, check out MapReduce: http://labs.google.com/papers/ They have a general-purpose computing framework for just about anything. Google engineers regularly submit MapReduce jobs to do all sorts of things other than search (whatever they happen to be working on at the time).

  22. Itanium quote of the day by whitehatlurker · · Score: 1
    This is from the second FA.

    "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.
  23. Why no Itanic by Groo+Wanderer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  24. Re:linux? Not exactly. by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  25. Re:linux? Not exactly. by daknapp · · Score: 5, Informative

    In fact, here is the most relevent passage from the article:

    The computational core of 65,536 compute nodes is partitioned into 1,024 logical processing sets, called psets. Each pset consists of one I/O node running Linux and 64 compute nodes running a custom compute node kernel(CNK).
  26. Re:I see that... by Pantero+Blanco · · Score: 1

    Why would Macs be in the top five Supercomputing slots? Or in the top 100 for that matter? That's not their game...Macs are geared to the Desktop, and only a certain portion of that market.

  27. Re:linux? Not exactly. by TheKubrix · · Score: 1

    Where does it say that its definatly very NOT linux?

  28. Re:But Virginia Tech is No. 1 in Education!! by emlprime · · Score: 1

    You seem to have left out reliable.

  29. Re:linux? Not exactly. by Kadin2048 · · Score: 1

    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."
  30. Oh but they are by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Oh but they are by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Oh but they are by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Oh but they are by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Oh but they are by Kadin2048 · · Score: 1

      Although I don't necessarily agree with them per se (the folks who think that Linux should be the One True OS for Everyone), I'm not sure that you can convince me that the reverse of the current situation regarding Windows and Linux would be worse or even as bad as it is now. The inherently fragmented, decentralized nature of Linux wouldn't allow it to be leveraged by one company in the same way that Microsoft uses Windows. If some company decided to start charging a few hundred bucks a processor for their Linux-based OS, plus a few hundred more for "Linux Terminal Services," plus a few more for the client system's OS, it would only take one reasonably deep-pocketed client one time to say 'hell with this' and fork the code. Perhaps over time, some company could add enough clean-room-developed pieces of proprietary code (or one totally proprietary 'killer app') to get people locked in to their system, but I think it would take a new generation of users to not be able to see through that play.

      What I do agree with is that rule by Apple might concievably be almost as bad as rule by Microsoft (and given that I'm writing this on a Power Mac which I'm very fond of, it pains me to say it), I'm not sure that Linux has enough of a strong governing body to exert what power it might gain if it ever became dominant.

      That said, it's probably not going to be a situation we'll have to deal with, at least in the forseeably near future, so the whole argument does fall a bit deeply into the 'academic wanking' category.

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    5. Re:Oh but they are by VENONA · · Score: 1

      Mod parent up. In the days when humor posts can be +5, why can't an essentially sane and common viewpoint?

      --
      What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
    6. Re:Oh but they are by strikethree · · Score: 1

      removing features from the most popular software because it's "too flexible" for many users

      i apologize but i just HAVE to respond to this...

      why would you have to remove features? you will limit the power users and then the power users (aka programmers who may, or do, contribute to open source projects) will have no reason or desire to use the software! if the newbs (sorry for the pejorative) can't handle the wide feature set, partition off the most used features to an area that newbs are likely to find them... but do not EVER reduce the feature set. i just won't use it *cough* gnome *cough*

      strike

      --
      "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
    7. Re:Oh but they are by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 1

      "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."

      Agreed. But also ask yourself: "Of the people using Microsoft, what percentage got an 'A' in Operating Systems?" It is a two edged sword, you see. While Linux is seeing some adoption, it is still primarily used on servers, and by geeks who either run those servers or whose "other computer" is made by someone who made 64bit CPUs when Intel was limping towards '486.

      Myself, I have to admit that gaining marketshare would mean more clout with peripheral drivers. However, I don't have to like seeing good systems dumbed down so that they resemble (what I consider to be) old and ugly designs. If Linux could shake a magic wand and split the desktop market with MS, but had to become more like windows to do it, I'd hate it.

    8. Re:Oh but they are by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 1

      Corporate ideology is differenet enough it appears alien to mere citizens. However, there are certainly differences between companies, and Microsoft has been abusive for as long as they've had the power to be so. To suggest that any company that ascended would behave like Microsoft is to suggest that anyone elected president would be impeached.

    9. Re:Oh but they are by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      Yep, I feel the exact same way. I want software with the widest feature set possible (as long as the features actually make sense), and don't want to be limited because newbs are too confused.

      But some other people are saying that this must be done to increase Linux's popularity among non-programmers, so I just hope that they're wrong. Unfortunately, as far as GNOME goes, it seems that it's somehow getting more uptake by the large distros than KDE, and it seems to go for the "less features" philosophy.

    10. Re:Oh but they are by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

      Adn that's the thing is it really does have to become more Windows like to ever have a real chance of becomming huge. Firt off binary compatibility on the driver level is a must. You are just never going to get all companies to sign on for OSS drivers, so you have to cater to them. However along those lines you have to standardise other things. There has to be a graphics server, a window manager, a graphics tool kit and so on. While there could still be others that are optional installs, there'd have to be a standard that was defined as required as part of Linux. People need consistency in UI and operation if they are going to go for it. Likewise installs would need to be simplified. No asking which one of 4 browsers you want, even in advanced mode. Tell people how it's going to be, let them change it later if they can figure out how. Most people want direction, not choice.

      Now the whole of Linux wouldn't have to go this way, one particular distro could, and it could seperate itself from Linux as a whole. The problem would be, that if it really got popular, it's standards would become defacto standards all other distros woudl ahve to comply with, or shit wouldn't run on them.

      That's what many Linux people don't want to come to terms with. They want Linux to be huge, but as a geek OS. Well in essence that's asking the world to become geeks and we know that's not going to happen. So you kinda have to pick which you want more: The geek Linux or the dominant Linux. Personally I think the geek Linux is the way to go. Microsoft really does make a fine user OS. So forget that market, let Apple try for it if they want, make a geek OS as good as you can and just deal with the limitations.

      I've got no problem with that, and no problem with those that want to change Linux to take over MS. I have a problem with those that think that everyone should fit in to the Linux mold and if you don't fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you shouldn't have a computer.

    11. Re:Oh but they are by somersault · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "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).

      --
      which is totally what she said
    12. Re:Oh but they are by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 1

      Well no, you don't have to cater to them. You just don't use shitty equipment, and part of defining "shitty" is whether it will run for me. No big deal.

      We are talking at cross purposes in terms of GUIs, because it is the inflexability in MS Windows that I hate. I can't stand using it for more than a couple days before I feel like I never want to see their layout again. You can't make more than insignificant changes without paying for third party extentions, and I fear Windows is too britle for layering very much on top of it, anyways.

      A happy medium would be the development of a "Linux for Dummies" GUI that Windows Power Users could learn to use. Just don't expect to see anyone switching over to it except for said Windows Power Users.

  31. And yet none by Trogre · · Score: 2, Funny

    could withstand the mighty power of a Slashdotting!

    ERROR
    The requested URL could not be retrieved

    While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.top500.org/lists/2005/11/basic

    The following error was encountered:
            * Connection Failed

    The system returned:
            (60) Connection timed out

    The remote host or network may be down. Please try the request again.

    --
    "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
  32. But... by dcapel · · Score: 3, Funny

    Does it run....

    D'oh.

    Image a Beowolf cluster...

    D'oh.

    --
    DYWYPI?
    1. Re:But... by sydneyfong · · Score: 1

      No, really.

      Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these...

      --
      Don't quote me on this.
  33. Re:Google = the world's biggest supercomputer by rmallico · · Score: 1

    heh... my back bedroom looks like that...

    --
    sig goes here!
  34. In case you were wondering... by vectorian798 · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...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

  35. Re:Google = the world's biggest supercomputer by diegocgteleline.es · · Score: 1

    They regularly lie about those numbers, too. They don't want to say it, it's just that. The google cluster is the real heart of google.

  36. The fifth supercomputer was an Amiga by wildzeke · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

  37. Go us by ajkst1 · · Score: 2, Funny

    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?

  38. 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

    1. Re:Japanese SUPER HYPER MEGA EFFICIENT ENGINEERING by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Japanese SUPER HYPER MEGA EFFICIENT ENGINEERING by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      And then you throw a somewhat complex and not-so-parallell problem on the Blue Gene, and practical efficiency drops down to somewhere around 15%.

  39. Linux Claims 4 of the Top 5 Supercomputer Spots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well done linux, i yearn for the day when the headlines read

    Female Linux Users Claim 4 of the Top 5 Supermodel Finalists

  40. There must be some mistake... by EnderWiggin99 · · Score: 2, Funny

    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

  41. Yawn, part 2: by imsabbel · · Score: 1

    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?
  42. Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 by PCM2 · · Score: 2, Funny

    You jest, but Microsoft actually does have a horse in this race.

    --
    Breakfast served all day!
  43. ...and the fifth one? by HermanAB · · Score: 1, Redundant

    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...
  44. Less duh, more history by fm6 · · Score: 4, Informative
    The alternative is Unix, which is what most supercomputers used to run. Or more precisely, they ran proprietary OSs that had started out as ports of Unix to their particular hardware. Then in the late 90s everybody realized that they couldn't afford to keep developing their own processors, and started shifting to commodity processors, such as Itanium. Rather than go to the expense of porting their own OSs to the new processors, they just adopted Linux. A commodity OS for a commodity processor, if you will.

    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.

    1. Re:Less duh, more history by turne10 · · Score: 1
      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.

      uh, maybe they didn't port Irix to the Itanium, but if they didn't it wasn't because it was too expensive, because Irix was definitely ported to their PIII-based Visual Workstation line (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstati on)

      SGI never marketed/sold Visual Workstations running Irix due to fears that they'd cannibalize the sale of Cocktanes

      --
      NTAGARA
    2. Re:Less duh, more history by fm6 · · Score: 1
      ...Irix was definitely ported to their PIII-based Visual Workstation line
      And you know this is true because....?
  45. Re:*yawn* (Ahem...) by Frumious+Wombat · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  46. Not nearly that simple ... at all by ToasterofDOOM · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  47. Re:ready, set, by ozmanjusri · · Score: 1

    que the linux/amd fanboy bashings of WINTEL!!! ;-)

    Por que no? Pasa el tiempo, si?

    --
    "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  48. Reason why Linux is used by Ma3oxuct · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  49. Processors sorted by efficiency by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Processors sorted by efficiency by ejona · · Score: 1

      The most surprising is the Hitachi at 37. That only has 80 processors! That is a performance of 111 for Rmax/Processors. The top ones are only around 2 to 6 for such a stat. The next fewest number of processors used is 576 at 36 which has 15 for Rmax/proc.

  50. Re:Universal deployment. by VENONA · · Score: 1

    And so far as I know, Linux is the only OS that runs in both the embedded market (can it still fit in, and run a wristwatch?) and has multiple Top 10 technical computing rankings. Surely that's *some* reason for newcomers to computing to see that computing != MS.

    --
    What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
  51. Re:Google = the world's biggest supercomputer by Ironsides · · Score: 1

    Imagine if google started running SETI@HOME, Protien Folding or Distributed.net on their spare CPU cycles.

    --
    Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
  52. Re:I see that... by crashelite · · Score: 1

    the only one who used macs had 1100 dual processor macs (desktop models not rack mount) and is still in top 20... and they did it by their self... unlike all the others who had the vedors do it for them hints the SELF MADE part... and who would run windows on all those computers... can u imagine the # of licenses you would need DAMN...

    --
    (yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
  53. Re:But Virginia Tech is No. 1 in Education!! by ShadowFlyP · · Score: 1

    You're right I should have been more general when I said "avaliablity". What I really meant was RAS.

  54. they did by r00t · · Score: 1

    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.

  55. watch out for bill by torrents · · Score: 1


    linux better watch out
    http://news.com.com/Gates+to+tout+Microsofts+super computing+move/2100-1016_3-5951855.html?part=rss&t ag=5951855&subj=news

    --
    Get your torrents...
  56. Why was this moderated off-topic? by Ellen+Spertus · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Why was this moderated off-topic? by shish · · Score: 1
      The article was about blog software

      Pass me some of what you're smoking, kplzthx.

      "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. ..."

      --
      I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
  57. Re:I see that... by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I noticed the "X" dog tag too :-)

    Only thing is, most of the Mac users I know are more like, named Raven, or something, ya know? and are just so totally the "elitist asshole."

    ;-)

  58. Re:I see that... by FastDownload · · Score: 1

    ah, did you see #15? 15 COLSA United States MACH5 - Apple XServe, 2.0 GHz, Myrinet

    --
    Download Linux ISOs in 5 minutes using LoRS Tools available at http://loci.cs.utk.edu
  59. Most bang per buck by Danta · · Score: 1

    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.

  60. Re:I see that... by Danta · · Score: 1

    Has been done, though not updated with the new list. Take a look here.

  61. Linux is a computer now??? by master_p · · Score: 1

    what else? Linux the toaster??? Linux the car???

    1. Re:Linux is a computer now??? by a24061 · · Score: 1
      what else? Linux the toaster??? Linux the car???

      I think you mean "NetBSD the toaster".

  62. Re:linux? Not exactly. by __aanekd3853 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The compute nodes of Blue Gene/L do not run anything that may be called an OS. They basically run a single application thread per processor, and they do not do any sophisticated system work at all (no context switches, the single user process has access to all the memory, etc). The system tasks are concentrated in the so-called I/O-nodes, and those run Linux. So all the system-related things there are Linux indeed. See this paper, for instance.

    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.

  63. Re:linux? Not exactly. by WillerZ · · Score: 1

    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.
  64. Re:Universal deployment. by supermank17 · · Score: 1

    No, its not. Why should a newcomer care if the OS runs on a wristwatch? They want something to work well on their Desktop.

  65. Re:Universal deployment. by VENONA · · Score: 1

    I just thought the article in Linux Journal from a few years back was cool, relevant to a universal deployment thread, and likely hadn't gotten much popular press recently. How did newcomers and/or desktops become the foci of the thread, anyway? Some of us aren't evangelists. I couldn't care less about getting everyone to use what I use. To each their own. And as far as those newcomers go, a case could be made that more Linux newcomers are exposed to it on the server than on the desktop. That's certainly been the case at a couple of gigs I've done. Not that there's any way of proving either case, given the myriad ways Linux gets distributed. There are a lot more ways to be exposed to Linux (or the BSDs, etc.) than via the desktop. You sound like yet another one of those people who think their environment constitutes all of computing. That's ugly enough in Windows people. BTW, all this caused me to doubt the accuracy of your statement that it wasn't small enough to fit on a wristwatch. A good thing, because I just googled up http://www.research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/linu xwatch/linuxwatch.html Last entry in the timeline there is "May 2004: IBM demonstrates Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) on the watch. Sounds as if the Linux watch project may still be getting sporadic work done on it.

    --
    What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
  66. Apple-built supercomputer at Virginia Tech by GPS+Pilot · · Score: 1

    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.
  67. Re:MS anything? any where? by hhawk · · Score: 1

    was trying to say, do any super computers run ANY bit of software from MS?

    --
    http://www.hawknest.com/