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Finally, It's the Year of the Linux... Supercomputer (zdnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the finally-it's-here dept.

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."

10 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Linus by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Linus has created literally trillions in economic activity. Singlehanded. But techies worship Musk. Very odd.

    1. Re:Linus by Riceballsan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Welcome to the world of business. If you want to power the world you can... but if you can look good and speak with charisma you can get more fame regardless of knowledge level. Same reason why Jobs was center stage for so long.

    2. Re:Linus by Wookie+Monster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The Github that sold for $7.5B wasn't the same Github that was created in three months. Hundreds of people, working for ten years made Github worth $7.5B. That initial version wasn't worth any more than the time spent developing it.

    3. Re:Linus by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Linus has created literally trillions in economic activity. Singlehanded. But techies worship Musk. Very odd.

      Singlehanded huh? So he wrote every version of Linux, every fork, every application, and every improvement was his idea?

      He is obviously the guy who kicked it all off, but to say he did it all singlehanded is selling thousands of people short.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    4. Re:Linus by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It is the difference of the creator of the infrastructure vs the creator of the implementation.

      It is like thanking the Firemen who saved your life from the burning building Vs thanking the guys who built the road to get to your home from the fire station, or the materials expert that allowed your home to maintain structure to allow the firemen to reach your home in time.

      The Linux Kernel really doesn't do anything useful, unless there are people who work with it and create with it. Linus may had made a kernel to help control these super computers but it was a team of other people who needed to work with the Kernel to make a super computer out of it.

      Does Linus deserve Credit? Yes. Do Techies worship Musk? Some may.
      However Linus is mostly focused on making the kernel better (a noble goal on its own). While Musk is trying to solve problems, and may choose to use the Linux Kernel as a tool in solving the problem.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    5. Re:Linus by Drethon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Linus has created literally trillions in economic activity. Singlehanded. But techies worship Musk. Very odd.

      I would say enabled, rather than created. But the work Linus and those who developed Linux did is seriously underrated.

  2. Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale ... by nickovs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... 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?
  3. Good for Linux! by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Informative

    And congrats to all that support and develop for it, especially one Mr Linus Benedict Torvalds.

  4. Re:Curmudgeon factor by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    Very adept at self promotion? Have you seen Elon Musk speak? He's a nerd. The quintessential nerd, with a head full of facts and figures and very poor command of his tongue. People lionize him and promote him, then blame him for self promoting, when in fact he's absolutely terrible at actually promoting himself. He talks about ideas and business activities and people call that self promotion. There's very little mention of himself, except when the interviewer inevitably asks, "Why are you doing this?" Then he answers with his, "I think humanity should be a multiplanetary species." That's about the only time he says "I think". The rest of the time, he's busy telling you what his companies are doing, and people somehow interpret that as self promotion.

    As opposed to what a Kardashian is saying, which is somehow.... fine? Humans baffle me.

  5. Kids these days by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!