Linux & supercomputers

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 03:29:12PM -0400, James Knott wrote:
> "Twice a year, the Top500 Project publishes its list of the fastest
> supercomputers in the world. In the last announcement, we continue
> to see Linux dominating the list. This is nothing new since Linux
> has been dominating since the mid-2000s. In fact, Linux share in
> supercomputing looks a lot like Microsoft’s historical share of the
> desktop market. I thought it would be interesting to take a step
> back and look at the performance capability of these computers as a
> whole and also how the rise of Linux is mirroring the geographical
> expansion of supercomputers."
> 
> http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2011/06/supercomputing-freakonomics-finding-meaning-beyond-headlines

Well these days Linux natively supports up to 4096 CPUs in a single
system image.  Clustering of course has no such limit.  I believe the
largest single image system so far is one from Silicon Graphics, which
has 2048 CPUs when you build the maximum config.  The largest Windows HPC
edition can run 256 CPUs in a single system image, and is supported on
the SGI, although of course it is of little use if you have a 2048CPU
machine.  The normal OS on those machines is SuSE.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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