In the latest Top500 supercomputer rankings, 476 of the top 500 fastest supercomputers,
95.2 percent, in the world run Linux. Linux has ruled supercomputing for years. But, it wasn't always that way.
When the
first Top500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993, Linux was just gathering steam. Indeed, in 1993, the first successful Linux distributions,
Slackware and
Debian were only just getting off the ground.
What happened next, as reported in
The Linux Foundation's forthcoming report,
20 years of Top500.org Supercomputer Data Links Linux With Advances in Computing Performance,
was that "after first appearing on the list in 1998, Linux has
consistently dominated the top 10 over the past decade and has comprised
more than 90 percent of the list since June 2010."
Before Linux made its move, Unix was supercomputing's dominant
operating system. Since 2003, the top operating system by performance
share on the Top500 List underwent a complete flip from 96 percent Unix
to 96 percent Linux. By 2004, Linux had taken over the lead for good.
According to The Linux Foundation, "Linux [became] the driving force
behind the breakthroughs in computing power that have fueled research
and technological innovation. In other words, Linux is dominant in
supercomputing, at least in part, because it is what is helping
researchers push the limits on computing power."
The Foundation believes that this has happened because of two
reasons. First, since most of the world’s top supercomputers are
superscalar research machines built for specialized tasks, each
supercomputer is a standalone project with unique characteristics and
optimization requirements. Thus, it's not affordable for anyone to
develop a custom operating system for each system. With Linux, however,
research teams can easily modify and optimize Linux to the one-off,
groundbreaking designs that characterize the modern generation of
supercomputers.
And, just as importantly, "The licensing cost of a custom,
self-supported Linux distribution is the same, whether you’re using 20
nodes or 20-million nodes." Thus, "by tapping into the vast open-source
Linux community, projects had access to free support and developer
resources to help keep developer costs on par with, or below other
operating systems."
The result of this has been supercomputers that are going faster than
ever. By total RMax, a supercomputer's maximum achieved performance on
the
Linpack benchmark, supercomputer performance has outpaced
Moore’s Law
(The number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately
double every 24 months.) by doubling roughly every 14 months. At the top
end, supercomputing is progressing at even more rapid rate. The RMax of
the fastest supercomputer on the Top500 list has increased by a factor
of three to reach the Tianhe-2’s 33.86 petaflop/second in 2013 from the
CM-5’s 59.7 gigaflop/s in 1993."
Therefore, The Linux Foundation concluded, "By isolating RMax by
operating system using the past 20 years of Top500 data, it’s clear that
Linux is not only responsible for supporting the majority of
supercomputers today, but is a driving force behind the disproportionate
growth in supercomputing capacity over the past decade. In continuing
to drive progress and innovation in computing, Linux is also helping to
explore the mysteries of the universe and solve our toughest problems."
I can only agree with these conclusions.
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