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Finally, It's the Year of the Linux... Supercomputer (zdnet.com)
Beeftopia writes: From ZDNet: "The latest TOP500 Supercomputer list is out. What's not surprising is that Linux runs on every last one of the world's fastest supercomputers. Linux has dominated supercomputing for years. But, Linux only took over supercomputing lock, stock, and barrel in November 2017. That was the first time all of the TOP500 machines were running Linux. Before that IBM AIX, a Unix variant, was hanging on for dear life low on the list."
An interesting architectural note: "GPUs, not CPUs, now power most of supercomputers' speed."
An interesting architectural note: "GPUs, not CPUs, now power most of supercomputers' speed."
Linus has created literally trillions in economic activity. Singlehanded. But techies worship Musk. Very odd.
... Linux is also taking over the world of IoT.
I don't think that there has ever been another operating system that has been used across such a wide range of systems with such a range of scales.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
And congrats to all that support and develop for it, especially one Mr Linus Benedict Torvalds.
Let's face it, as bright and influential as Torvalds has been, and continues to be, most people would not rate him highly on the warm and fuzzy scale. He is not a man that seeks approval. He is not a man that wants to be in the spotlight.
In some ways I think he is like Steve Wozniak. Just a shy, quiet but brilliant engineer that would rather just be left alone than doing the cocktail party circuit.
History tends to reward the Musks and Jobs of this world who are very smart in their own right but also very adept at self promotion.
I tend to have more respect for Linus and Woz. They are the men behind the curtain doing all the heavy lifting.
Linus has created literally trillions in economic activity. Singlehanded. But techies worship Musk. Very odd.
Singlehanded?!? I guess, if you ignore all the work done on gcc, glibc, bash, systemd, other system tools, thousands of kernel developer contributors, thousands of people putting together distributions, people writing build systems, multiple languages, hardware manufactures, etc...
Linus work is probably not even 1 millionth of the total work that went into producing your average computer, let alone super computers.
An interesting architectural note: "GPUs, not CPUs, now power most of supercomputers' speed."
Who is this beeftopia guy who is so monumentally ignorant of the history of supercomputing? That's not an "interesting architectural note". That's supercomputing since the very beginning of supercomputing. Supercomputers are supercomputers specifically because they had vector processors, before "GPU" was even a recognizable acronym. When PCs had nothing but framebuffers, supercomputers had vector processors. That was the point of building them. Once the GPU was invented, utilizing them to build a supercomputer was an inevitability.
And get off my lawn!
When was it NOT the year of the Linux supercomputer?
This means exactly nothing for the desktop where it's most craved for.
It's interesting that relatively weak CPU coupled with multiple fast vector processors that could do massive parallel calculations was basically the design of the original Cray supercomputers and we're back to that design coupled with fast interconnects to team up many, many nodes. Kinda cool to see that Seymour had it right =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.