Posted by Calixte Pictet | 2 comments
What Supercomputers Mean to Linux
Every 6 months, top500.org provides an updated list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers on the planet. The data they provide contains not only the manufacturer of the machine–as Hans Meuer’s list has done since the mid 80′s–but also information about the owner, the country, the computer’s architecture and of course, the operating system.
If you haven’t been sleeping these last years, you’ve probably noticed that Windows is loosing some of its dominance on the PC market, primarily to Apple’s Mac OS X. However, Linux’s growth is not obvious to all. That’s because most of this growth has been going on behind the scenes, not on the desktop, but on servers and, well, supercomputers. But what is a supercomputer?
Basically, a supercomputer is one of the most powerful computers in the world. Supercomputers are used for calculation-intense tasks such as weather-forecasting and climatology, physical simulations (including research in astrophysics and nuclear fission), etc.
Until the late 90′s, most supercomputers ran Unix. The new kid on the block, Linux, quickly took over. In less than half a decade, more than half of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers were using Linux, and a little more than 80% do today. The rest run mostly Unix and Windows (only 5 machines for the latter).
Of those who don’t use the community-maintained Linux, half are from the Linux family (i.e. running a modified version of the Linux kernel). This means that a full 91% of the world’s most powerful computers run Linux, and 81% run the same kernel as me (and you too if you use Ubuntu or another free Linux distribution).
Why should we care? Amanda McPherson of the Linux Foundation notes that “the work accomplished by the Super Computer manufacturers (IBM, HP, Fujitsu, Cray and so on) is poured back into the kernel and ends up helping all users.” With Moore’s law and the increasing growth of our (normal) computer’s processing power, super-computers tend to be no more that tomorrow’s normal computers (in bigger format).
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Thumbnail image: The Columbia supercomputer at NASA, once the 2nd most powerful computer, ranks 20th worldwide as of June 2010. It runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
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