You must log in or register to comment.
Can we get a source for this image?
Sure. Added it to the post.
This looks impressive for Linux, and I’m glad FLOSS has such an impact! However, I wonder if the numbers are still this good if you consider more supercomputers. Maybe not. Or maybe yes! We’d have to see the evidence.
There’s no reason to believe smaller supercomputers would have significantly different OS’s.
At some point you enter the realm of mainframes and servers.
Mainframes almost all run Linux now, the last Unix’s are close to EOL.
Servers have about a 75% Linux market share, with the rest mostly running Windows and some BSD.I wonder if the numbers are still this good if you consider more supercomputers.
Great question. My guess is not terribly different.
“Top 500 Supercomputers” is arguably a self-referential term. I’ve seen the term “super-computer” defined whether it was among the 500 fastest computer in the world, on the day it went live.
As new super-computers come online, workloads from older ones tend to migrate to the new ones.
So there usually aren’t a huge number of currently operating supercomputers outside of the top 500.
When a super-computer falls toward the bottom of the top 500, there’s a good chance it is getting turned off soon.
That said, I’m referring here only to the super-computers that spend a lot of time advertising their existence.
I suspect there’s a decent number out there today that prefer not to be listed. But I have no reason to think those don’t also run Linux.
Wow, that’s kind of a lot more Linux than I was expecting, but it also makes sense. Pretty cool tbh.
Linux is just the unix flavor that replaced the others.
Ah hahahaha!!!
Windows! Some dumbass put Windows on a supercomputer!
Prob Microsoft themselves
Good point.
But still, the 30% efficient supercomputer.
I don’t think either of the chart’s axes list efficiency?
Ironically, even Microsoft uses Linux in its Azure datacenters, iirc
Apple uses both Linux and Windows (not for datacenters) too.
deleted by creator
A supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008 actually ranked 23 in TOP500 in June 2008.
I always forget that Windows Server even exists, because the name is so stupid. “windows” should mean “gui
interfaceto os.”edit: fixed redundacy.
But Windows Server has GUI. Although a server having GUI (not webui, desktop) is kinda stupid
I’d say having a GUI is not inherently stupid. The stupid part is, if I understand it correctly, the GUI being a required component and the primary access method.
Probably need one, just for the benchmark comparisons.
And Mac! Whatever that means 🤣
Surprised to learn that there were windows based Supercomputers.
Those were the basic entry level configurations needed to run Windows Vista with Aero effects.
As someone who worked on designing racks in the super computer space about 10 q5vyrs ago I had no clue windows and mac even tried to entered the space
There was a time when a bunch of organisations made their own supercomputers by just clustering a lot of regular computers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(supercomputer)For Windows I couldn’t find anything.
If you google “Windows supercomputer”, you just get lots of results about Microsoft supercomputers, which of course all run on Linux.No there was HPC sku of Windows 2003 and 2008 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2003#Windows_Compute_Cluster_Server
Microsoft earnestly tried to enter the space with a deployment system, a job scheduler and an MPI implementation. Licenses were quite cheap and they were pushing hard with free consulting and support, but it did not stick.
but it did not stick.
Yeah. It was bad. The job of a Supercomputer is to be really fast and really parallel. Windows for Supercomputing was… not.
I honestly thought it might make it, considering the engineering talent that Microsoft had.
But I think time proves that Unix and Linux just had an insurmountable head start. Windows, to the best of my knowledge, never came close to closing the gap.
At this point I think it’s most telling that even Azure runs on Linux. Microsoft’s twin flagship products somehow still only work well when Linux does the heavy lifting and works as the glue between
Where did you find that azure runs on linux? I have been qurious for a while, but google refuse to tell me anything but the old “a variant of hyper-v” or “linux is 60% of the azure worklad” (not what i asked about!)
Where did you find that azure runs on linux?
I dont know of anywhere that Microsoft confirms, officially, that Azure, itself, is largely running on Linux. They share stats about what workloads other are running on it, but not, to my knowledge, about what it is compared of.
I suppose that would be an oversimplification, anyway.
But that Azure itself is running mostly on Linux is an open secret among folks who spend time chatting with engineers who have worked into he Azure cloud.
When I have chatted with them, Azure cloud engineers have displayed huge amouts of Linux experience while they sometimes needed to “phone a friend” to answer Windows server edition questions.
Good question! I can’t remember.
I think I read a Microsoft blog or something like a decade ago that said they shifted from a Hyper-V based solution to Linux to improve stability, but honestly it’s been so long I wouldn’t be shocked if I just saw it in a reddit comment on a related article that I didn’t yet have the technical knowhow to fully comprehend and took it as gospel.
But, surely Windows is the wrong OS?
Windows is a per-user GUI… supercomputing is all about crunching numbers, isn’t it?
I can understand M$ trying to get into this market and I know Windows server can be used to run stuff, but again, you don’t need a GUI on each node a supercomputer they’d be better off with DOS…?
I could see the NT kernel being okay in isolation, but the rest of Windows coming along for the ride puts the kibosh on that idea.
But, surely Windows is the wrong OS?
Oh yes! To be clear - trying to put any version of Windows on a super-computer is every bit as insane as you might imagine. By what I heard in the rumor mill, it went every bit as badly as anyone might have guessed.
But I like to root for an underdog, and it was neat to hear about Microsoft engineers trying to take the Windows kernel somewhere it had no rational excuse to run, perhaps by sheer force of will and hard work.
Yeh it was system x I worked on out default was redhat. I forget the other options but win and mac sure as shut wasn’t on the list
about 10 q5vyrs ago
Have you been distracted and typed a password/PSK in the wrong field 8)
Lol typing on phone plus bevy. Can’t defend it beyond that
Just need to do a dnf update on them all…
I’m confused on why they separate BSD from Unix. BSD is a Unix variant.
To make it more specific I guess, what’s the problem with that? It’s like having a “people living on boats” and “people with no long term address”. You could include the former in the latter, but then you are just conveying less information.
So is Linux. So I guess the light blue is all other UNIX variants?
no, it’s not
I think this is a Ship of Theseus thing here that we’re going to argue about because at what point is it just UNIX-like and not UNIX?
UNIX-like is definitely a descriptor currently used for Linux.
Even the Wikipedia entry starts that way.
It’s Unix if you pay to have it certified (assuming it’s compatible to begin with). That’s basically it.
Some Linux distros have
Some commercial ones did at some point. I’m not sure if they still do.
The question is whether their users care or not I suppose.
Yes, but it’s not Unix. That’s literally part of GNU/Linux’ name.
Mac OS is more Unix than Linux.
deleted by creator
Unix is basically a brand name.
BSD had to be completely re-written to remove all Unix code, so it could be published under a free license.
It isn’t Unix certified.So it is Unix-derived, but not currently a Unix system (which is a completely meaningless term anyway).
Maybe windows is not used in supercomputers often because unix and linux is more flexiable for the cpus they use(Power9,Sparc,etc)
Plus Linux doesn’t limit you in the number of drives, whereas Windows limits you from A to Z. I read it here.
You can mount drives against folders in windows. So while D: is one drive, D:\Logs or D:\Cake can each be a different disk.
Ok that would make sense tbh
For people who haven’t installed Windows before, the default boot drive is G, and the default file system is C
So you only have 25 to work with (everything but G)
G can be mapped after boot (usually to removable drives)
So you’re telling me that there was a Mac super computer in '05?
If I recall correctly they linked a bunch of powermacs together with FireWire.
It apparently later was transitioned to Xserves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(supercomputer)
G5
Oof, in only a couple years it was worthless.
Also known as Big Mac
haha
Funnily enough is was known for being quite cheap
We’re gonna take the test, and we’re gonna keep taking it until we get one hundred percent in the bitch!
What would the other be
How can there be N/A though? How can any functional computer not have an operating system? Or is just reading the really big MHz number of the CPU count as it being a supercomputer?
They ofcouse had one, probably linux, or unix. But that information, about the cluster, is not available.
Early computers didn’t have operating systems.
You just plugged in a punch card or tape with the program you want to run and the computer executed those exact instructions and nothing else.
Those programs were specifically written for that exact hardware (not even for that model, but for that machine).
To boot up the computer, you had to put a number of switches into the correct position (0 or 1), to bring its registers in the correct state to accept programs.So you were the BIOS and bootloader, and there was no need for an OS because the userspace programs told the CPU directly what bits to flip.
Thanks for the links!
TempleOS
a glowie’s worst nightmare
Praise be upon him
When you really have to look deep into god’s mind you just have to put templeOS on a supercomputer.
If you install TempleOS on the fastest supercomputer Frontier, you get Event Horizon.
WARNING: Gory, disturbing pictureDo NOT network-enable TempleOS.
God will get angry if you do.
What movie/tv show is this image from?
Event Horizon
Would the one made out of playstations be in this statistic?
Yes, in the linux stat. The otheros option on the early PS3 allowed you to boot linux, which is what most, of not all, of the clusters used.
I think you can actually see it in the graph.
The Condor Cluster with its 500 Teraflops would have been in the Top 500 supercomputers from 2009 till ~2014.
The PS3 operating system is a BSD, and you can see a thin yellow line in that exact time frame.
Now the real question is what package manager are they using? apt or yum? Lol
they specifically built it to only use snaps
Also, Gnome or KDE?
It’s probably mostly cli
Yeah, but gterminal or konsole?
They are using pacman obviously :)
nah theyre using nixpkgs
Wait what Mac?
The Big Mac. 3rd fastest when it was built and also the cheapest, costing only $5.2 million.
Interesting. It’s like those data centers that ran on thousands of Xboxes
Wha?
(searches interwebs)
Wow, that completely passed me by…
I think it was PS3 that shipped with “Other OS” functionality, and were sold a little cheaper than production costs would indicate, to make it up on games.
Only thing is, a bunch of institutions discovered you could order a pallet of PS3’s, set up Linux, and have a pretty skookum cluster for cheap.
I’m pretty sure Sony dropped “Other OS” not because of vague concerns of piracy, but because they were effectively subsidizing supercomputers.
Don’t know if any of those PS3 clusters made it onto Top500.
Makes me think how PS2 had export restrictions because “its graphics chip is sufficiently powerful to control missiles equipped with terrain reading navigation systems”
Some of thaose restrictions get stupid. We had a client ship us their hardware and they included Laser Mouse on the manifest. The US border controls would not allow delivery due to a Laser being included LOL. Had they just entered it as a Mouse the package would have been delivered.
That’s so friggin cool to think about!
It was 33rd in 2010:
In November 2010, the Air Force Research Laboratory created a powerful supercomputer, nicknamed the “Condor Cluster”, by connecting together 1,760 consoles with 168 GPUs and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of 500 trillion floating-point operations per second (500 TFLOPS). As built, the Condor Cluster was the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world and was used to analyze high definition satellite imagery at a cost of only one tenth that of a traditional supercomputer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html
OMG I can feel the heat emanating from that photo
Oh Xserve, we hardly knew ye 😢
3rd fastest
And 1st tastiest
That’s highly debatable.
Mac is a flavor of Unix, not that surprising really.
Mac is also also derived from BSD since it is built on Darwin
Apple had its current desktop environment for it’s proprietary ecosystem built on BSD with their own twist while supercomputers are typically multiuser parallel computing beats, so I’d say it is really fucking surprising. Pretty and responsive desktop environments and breathtaking number crunchers are the polar opposites of a product. Fuck me, you’ll find UNIX roots in Windows NT but my flabbers would be ghasted if Deep Blue had dropped a Blue Screen.
