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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."
2.57 petaflops per second
floating point operations per second per second?
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.
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BMO
I do scientific high-performance computing, and there is simply no reason anyone would want to run Windows on a supercomputer.
Linux has native, simple support for compiling the most common HPC languages (C and Fortran). It is open source and extensively customizable, so it's easy to make whatever changes need to be made to optimize the OS on the compute nodes, or optimize the communication latency between nodes. Adding support for exotic filesystems (like Lustre) is simple, especially since these file systems are usually developed *for* Linux. It has a simple, robust, scriptable mechanism for transferring large amounts of data around (scp/rsync) and a simple, unified mechanism for working remotely (ssh). Linux (the whole OS) can be compiled separately from source to optimize for a particular architecture (think Gentoo).
What advantage does Windows bring to a HPC project?