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All 500 of the World's Top 500 Supercomputers Are Running Linux (zdnet.com)
Freshly Exhumed shares a report from ZDnet: Linux rules supercomputing. This day has been coming since 1998, when Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list. Today, it finally happened: All 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers are running Linux. The last two non-Linux systems, a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX, dropped off the November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list. When the first TOP500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993, Linux was barely more than a toy. It hadn't even adopted Tux as its mascot yet. It didn't take long for Linux to start its march on supercomputing.
From when it first appeared on the TOP500 in 1998, Linux was on its way to the top. Before Linux took the lead, Unix was supercomputing's top operating system. Since 2003, the TOP500 was on its way to Linux domination. By 2004, Linux had taken the lead for good. This happened for two reasons: First, since most of the world's top supercomputers are research machines built for specialized tasks, each machine is a standalone project with unique characteristics and optimization requirements. To save costs, no one wants to develop a custom operating system for each of these systems. With Linux, however, research teams can easily modify and optimize Linux's open-source code to their one-off designs. The semiannual TOP500 Supercomputer List was released yesterday. It also shows that China now claims 202 systems within the TOP500, while the United States claims 143 systems.
From when it first appeared on the TOP500 in 1998, Linux was on its way to the top. Before Linux took the lead, Unix was supercomputing's top operating system. Since 2003, the TOP500 was on its way to Linux domination. By 2004, Linux had taken the lead for good. This happened for two reasons: First, since most of the world's top supercomputers are research machines built for specialized tasks, each machine is a standalone project with unique characteristics and optimization requirements. To save costs, no one wants to develop a custom operating system for each of these systems. With Linux, however, research teams can easily modify and optimize Linux's open-source code to their one-off designs. The semiannual TOP500 Supercomputer List was released yesterday. It also shows that China now claims 202 systems within the TOP500, while the United States claims 143 systems.
Linux was originally made in Finland.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
oblig: other OS's are Finnished?
And these piece of shit Linux nodes fail all the time.
That must be why all 500 are running Linux - for the great failure rate. Or maybe you're wrong.
Eh, no, not really. You're talking about a KDE 1.0, pre-Gnome desktop... I used it, but I wouldn't have inflicted it on anyone I needed to support. Five years later it was certainly reasonable, at least where the average non-technical user was concerned.
KDE was '96, GNOME '97.. in 1999 you'd already have KDE 2.0, didn't use that but I remember trying RHL 6.2 that came out in April 2000 which looks pretty much like a normal desktop to me. Remember that it was going head to head with Windows ME as the consumer desktop, using either was a major PITA. Granted, XP was a big step up but then you had Vista... you can make a lot of excuses for YotLD not happening but that Microsoft brought their A-game is not one of them.
The cornerstone for Microsoft's dominance is Office and Excel in particular, all those people who had to use Windows at work of course took what little knowledge and training they had and bought a Windows machine for home too. When Outlook kicked Lotus Notes to the curb they locked that market up good.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Odd statement, considering Microsoft mantra declares Linux is far more expensive than Linux.
I think you got that backwards
On a scale of LFS to Mandrake, how bad was your experience?
I'll be installing Linux when I have a week of downtime.
It takes me a couple months to transition a new workstation to Windows. Each time, I try to learn what the native software options are and whether they can meet my current needs. Where it doesn't, I install or use recommended software in most cases to see if it does what I need (WSL) though I do have exceptions for my personal favorite software in a few instances where I'm just unwilling to learn something new. (EditPlus, GIMP, VLC, Sysinternals, Putty.)
A new install of Linux takes the same process, but it has apt or yum or whatever which speeds things up pretty dramatically. With a new Linux desktop install, I just rarely have to learn too many new things... usually. (Eyeballing you hard here systemd!)
If I have to support any significant sized network, and if it's possible, I'd do Linux desktops everywhere. I'd rather use those admin systems than admin Windows... but I work in a job where I have to support Windows because that's all the core software runs on. As an admin, I can do about anything I need to on Microsoft servers and workstations. It'd be false modesty to say I'm not good at admin on Microsoft system. On the other hand, I have used Linux and various BSDs at home and work (on servers) since the late 90's. I could eliminate Microsoft in our workplace and cut our IT departmental work by maybe 30% if only our primary system ran on Linux. I'd miss some of the AD/DHCP/DNS/DFS stack. I'd miss Excel (running native) and Exchange/Outlook, but honestly, running the alternatives in the cloud or Libre would probably reduce our helpdesk workload after a year or two.
I'm good at my jobs, and whatever systems I admin, I'll learn to be good at. Given the ideal scenario, I could run several thousand workstations with the same effort I'd use for a couple hundred Windows workstations. The scenarios I have been hired to handle haven't been ideal, so I've learned to take advantage of the environments I'm in. I'm good at my jobs because I like to learn. I like tinkering, trying new things, scripting and writing real code. That makes me useful, maybe even it helps toward making me valuable.
On the other hand, my varied experiences and experimenting have made me aware that my own weakness is a desire to try new things. If I were designing the systems for a company responsible for my income, it wouldn't be Linux or Windows or Mac. It'd be PC-BSD on the workstations and AIX on the servers. They're boring. Boring is what I look for in a business network. Ideally, the network will be so stable that IT doesn't spend any time working on the backend systems, and that means boring is the goal. I like Linux because I'm always learning new stuff and I like Windows.. sorta, because I'm always being forced to learn new things. That's why I'm sorry to see AIX take a dip off the top 500, but I can see it; Linux is fun.
Linux still isn't ready for any desktop it isn't installed on. It IS installed on lots of desktops in places like research labs, mine included. But if it's going to make it to anybody else's desk it needs some basic things fixed. I don't know if it's possible to do something as simple as configure a graphics driver in Ubuntu's GUI, but it's certainly not easy.
Everything else works perfectly fine, but none of the GUI systems seem to offer a user friendly way for command line averse users to fiddle with their system settings.
Both AMD and Nvidia have their config UI packaged to their binary blob driver on linux.
I'm not even sure what you are asking here. Do you truly have no idea how a GPL works?
Anyway, you have this exactly backwards. The reason Linux became popular during the parallel supercomputing "revolution" (and I say this as a modest expert, at least at that time) is because it IS an open source operating system, so you could hack the kernel, write your own kernel drivers, fix things like networking bugs or system balance issues, and handle memory at a very primitive level. You got then, and can easily get now, the complete source of the OS and all of its device drivers, although the latter has been a constant source of contention between hardware mfrs who think that a device driver that makes their hardware run is some sort of "trade secret" and the keepers of the Linux kernel. Over decades (at this point) the mfrs have largely given up and actively help with kernel drivers instead of insisting on binary-only distributions. This played a critical role in the development of early parallel supercomputers once Linux had its first kernel capable of symmetric multiprocessing with two (and rapidly more) CPUs or (later) cores, or both. That would be roughly kernel 2.0, although there were still serious issues with race conditions, (network) driver interrupts and lockups, memory management, and so on, through 2.0.4+ -- really they went on forever as the 2.0 kernel wasn't truly symmetric, handled interrupt locking "badly", and took a lot of revision and some new paradigms to smooth out and stabilize. Ah, those were the days...
Microsoft, on the other hand, made you sign away your firstborn child in order to get a copy of the OS source -- even as a research institution. If (say) your network drivers were slow, or locked up while multiprocessing, you were SOL. You COULDN'T fix it. You couldn't even find the bug. And it wasn't worth the effort -- even if you sacrificed a goat and got the source -- to learn to work with the source because it changed at MS's whim and all your work could go down the tubes at any moment and if you DID develop anything that ran on their system in some "custom" fashion, you ran into serious issues if you wanted to share it. You COULDN'T share your work with anybody else, not unless they had a surplus of goats or firstborn children too.
"Anybody" (with a need and decent programming chops) could join the linux kernel list and communicate directly with the main kernel developers and report bugs, contribute fixes or drivers, etc. There was a lot of healthy debate about what needed to be fixed, or improved, first, second, third etc, as well as just how to go about fixing them -- sometimes it required substantial redesign and had to wait for a major bump (and a lot of testing). You could of course hack/fix your own kernels or add your own device drivers, or fix broken drivers, or mess with internal "tuning", and I and many others did, but behind the public scenes the actual kernel developers -- the heart of linux, as it were -- made steady, inexorable progress.
By the year 2000, Linux had made serious inroads into not only the top 500, but there were literally uncounted small clusters that weren't fast enough (or weren't architected correctly) to crack the top 500, which relied on things like the Linpack benchmark to determine who to include. There were lots of folks who didn't USE linear algebra in their computations who built massively parallel compute farms with many different architectures and purposes who didn't even have the benchmark software installed (or give a shit) about their "ranking". Both PVM and MPI were fully ported onto Linux and most of their ongoing development was taking place on Linux boxes. Additional tools for management and job distribution and much more were developed -- on mostly Linux boxes, but yeah, there were still SGIs and Sun Microsystems clusters and much more out there. They suffered -- badly suffered, terminally badly suffered in pretty much all cases -- from being much, much more expensive than over the counter Intel or AMD box
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Actually he abandoned his homeland in search of warmth.
#DeleteChrome
Anybody still believe Linus Torvalds about how Linux was just for fun?
Of course. Linux was just for fun; now he makes a living out of it. A person's motivations for doing something don't have to remain exactly the same for the whole time they do it.
The technical term for this is "botnets".
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
shhh.. No one knows that all the TOP 500 supercomputers run on EMACS..
>> "I'll be installing Linux when I have a week of downtime." :)
If you need a week of downtime from MS to convince you to switch to Linux, you should rather stay with MS until having a month long downtime. Then you'll be really convinced
aaaaaaa
...it's quite literately the only logical choice
Oh I know, right? But the big fact you danced around is, Linux is just better than the others. It's faster and more reliable. Otherwise top 500 would not use it. Like, they tried to use Windows, they really did. Microsoft was paying academic institutions to install it and providing teams of free engineers. Still didn't do it. Why? Windows can't handle the load, it can't run continuously under load. It just gets more and more unstable then it falls over. Even when it does stay up, it can't touch the storage, scheduling or memory management efficiency of Linux.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
> The Supercomputers level of OSS use is primarily a concern with science. It compiles on multiple platforms, and is well maintained on most of them. Windows and MacOS are only available for the x86-64, ARM, and PPC platforms, and even then, not all of them.
This makes no sense. Almost all supercomputers are x86-64 based (+/- GPUs).
> That only leaves FreeBSD as an option, and FreeBSD isn't as virtualization friendly, and drivers aren't readily available for GPU systems.
Lol. Supercomputers don't use virtualization.
> So it's quite literately the only logical choice, owing to that the other choices would have required engineering resources.
That's not true, supercomputers within the past 5 years on the top500 list have used Windows, AIX, BSD, Linux. It's just that Linux is better for the job than the others.
> That said, Linux does not belong in safety systems, and I hope it never ends up in car automotive systems, power plants, or spacecraft.
I hope nobody who thinks supercomputers use virtualization ever have their opinion on a computing matter taken by the designer of a safety critical system.
Linux is in safety critical systems already. But it depends on the level and capabilities you're talking about. Processing doppler radar data and sending it to ATC systems in a timely manner is one thing. Running tight control loops in automotive engine and control systems is completely different and just isn't appropriate for Linux.
> Everything else is fair game. These systems need real time operating systems that are highly threaded and can respond to events instantly, not be scheduled, or deferred due to eating all the swap space (one of Linux's worst default features, and what makes it woefully awful for web servers by default.)
You're mixing up all sorts of things here. Nothing responds to interrupts "instantly", what you want is guaranteed hard upper limits. It doesn't even have to be all that fast often times, it just has to be an upper limit so you can design the system to meet response time requirements. Linux can respond "immediately" to interrupts, by the way. It does not have to be "scheduled". Work can be done in interrupt context.
"Highly threaded" what? That's nothing to do with real time.
"Deferred due to eating all swap space" What is this meaningless drivel? Automotive and aircraft control systems don't use swap space. They don't even use virtual memory for god's sake lol.
> (one of Linux's worst default features, and what makes it woefully awful for web servers by default.)
Apparently better than all the others at that too. Windows, OSX, and BSD must *really* be shit if Linux is so bad yet it still beat them all there too.
That said, Linux does not belong in safety systems
Dedicated real time operating systems obviously have their uses, but due to advances in embedded level hardware they're becoming less and less relevant. Even with the overheads of an "almost real time" OS like Linux with some compile switches most modern day embedded hardware is capable of making the dealines in all except some special super low latency use cases. Only place where a real time OS is even necessary these days are rare super low latency and super low power cases (as in under 0.25W).
Serious, 6502s and Z80s are no longer the standard embedded hardware out there anymore.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
It has nothing to do with not being able to handle the load. It has everything to do with costs. Linux is free. Windows isn't.
If I get you right, You spend all this money on a Supercomputer, so you logically use the cheapest OS out there instead of paid ones that should work better?
Sounds legit.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.