Money has no smell - Vespasian
|
|
|
Supercomputers run open source software
ACCORDING TO Novell nine out of ten of the most powerful supercomputers in the world run open source software.
The numbers come from the Top 500 supercomputers list, which shows that Linux powers nine of the top ten, and in total eighty five percent of the whole 500. In case you are wondering what this has to do with Novell, Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server runs on six of the top ten.
Holger Dyroff, vice president for business development at Novell, was obviously rather pleased about this and said, "Supercomputers are helping to push the boundary of science and knowledge around the world, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell has been chosen as the optimal operating system to power many of these HPC environments for good reasons. Linux has become the HPC operating system of choice, thanks to its scalability and performance capabilities, its similarity to UNIX, and the wide variety of open-source software and development tools available." In case you missed it, more than half of them run Novell's Linux distribution, SuSE.
The biggest supercomputer on the list is Jaguar, which lives, plays solitaire, and is planning world domination at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. According to the list it has a theoretical peak capability of 2.3 PetaFLOPS and consists of nearly a quarter of a million processor cores. However, it does not run Novell's SuSE Linux. µ
Share this:
Share
Using the search function on the site, I easily found that Windows (HPC probably) is used in only 5 of the 500 supercomputers listed.
There is also a category called Mixed which counts for 23 supercomputers.
The rest, meaning 472 out of 500, use BSD, Linux or UNIX.
Now THAT is saying something about the power of Windows.
At 7MW, Jaguar could also provide free heat and hot water to a few thousand homes, did they install a heat exchanger or just massive AC?
The power-to-core or power-to-flops ratio, even in the top ten, is interesting. You'd think the high-end would be more uniform, but it looks like these guys have pretty diverse solutions