Windows Cluster Hits a Petaflop, But Linux Retains Top-5 Spot

Twice a year, Top500.org publishes a list of supercomputing benchmarks from sites around the world; the new results are in. Reader jbrodkin writes "Microsoft says a Windows-based supercomputer has broken the petaflop speed barrier, but the achievement is not being recognized by the group that tracks the world's fastest supercomputers, because the same machine was able to achieve higher speeds using Linux. The Tokyo-based Tsubame 2.0 computer, which uses both Windows and Linux, was ranked fourth in the world in the latest Top 500 supercomputers list. While the computer broke a petaflop with both operating systems, it achieved a faster score with Linux, denying Microsoft its first official petaflop ranking." Also in Top-500 news, reader symbolset writes with word that "the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin takes the top spot with 2.57 petaflops. Although the US has long held a dominant position in the list things now seem to be shifting, with two of the top spots held by China, one by Japan, and one by the US. In the Operating System Family category Linux continues to consolidate its supercomputing near-monopoly with 91.8% of the systems — up from 91%. High Performance Computing has come a long way quickly. When the list started as a top-10 list in June of 1993 the least powerful system on the list was a Cray Y-MP C916/16526 with 16 cores driving 13.7 RMAX GFLOP/s. This is roughly the performance of a single midrange laptop today."

Comments

Re:About hardware, not operating systems

[hey!]

Well, it says the hardware ran linux at X speed, and windows at less than X speed...

Actually the article doesn't say that. The hardware was different: the Linux configuration had more nodes than the Windows configuration. This *might* have been for some technical reason, or it might have been for some extraneous reason (e.g., they have better things to do with this beast than run benchmarks on it).

In any case, the difference between the Windows and Linux scores was for practical purposes insignificant. It was a *benchmark*, not a real computation. Even if the benchmark is pretty good, the mix of resources used by a real program won't match it exactly (e.g. an app that uses less floating point calculations but more memory allocations might see a very different result).

Microsoft's aim is not to run on research clusters, but to make inroads into businesses that have in-house Windows system administration and programming capabilities and might have use for high performance computing. If so, the linpack benchmark is probably close to irrelevant for many applications.

Re:Won't somebody please think of the licensing co

[bmo]

Wait, what?

Have you ever paid attention to the OS trends in the Top500? All the proprietary OSes are disappearing. It used to be nearly all proprietary Unix and BSD. Now it's 91 percent Linux.

Here's a graph showing the demise of Unix in the Top500
http://www.top500.org/overtime/list/36/osfam

Linux doesn't scale? It fits in toasters and supercomputers. I think that's pretty good scaling if you ask me.

You could probably make the argument in 1991 when Linus smote the ground and came up with the kernel, but not anymore. You could probably even make that argument before kernel 2.0. But since then? Claiming that Linux doesn't scale well just makes you look like a Microsoft fanboy whistling while walking past the graveyard at best.

--
BMO

Re:Won't somebody please think of the licensing co

[zach_the_lizard]

Yet it powers most of the top 500 supercomputers and can run on embedded platforms. If that's poor scalability, I want to know what's good scalability.