Linux Leads the Super Pack

David Heath
Wednesday, 18 June 2008 18:45

Your IT - Home IT

The latest TOP500 listing of Supercomputers has been released with some interesting highlights.  Australia has just one entrant (ranked 468), whereas there are 6 in New Zealand - 4 of which are identical systems at Weta Studios.

As expected, the US has the greatest number of computers in the list, in fact slightly more than half.  Of the rest, most (37%) are in Europe with a small number of systems in Japan (22), China (12) and India (6).

Of much more interest, as I alluded to in a recent article is the penetration of Linux into this arena.  Depending upon how you count the numbers provided by TOP500, between 85% and 89% of the Supercomputers are running some version of Linux.  Of those that identify the distro, SuSE outnumbers Red Hat 10 to 1.  No others are identified.

A recent press release from Novell claimed that 20 of the top 50 in the November 2007 list were running some kind of SuSE.  In the latest list, 19 are listed as running SuSE.

Of greater interest is the fact that just 8 of the 500 are not running some flavour of Unix.  Three of those are running a specialised Cray OS, the other five (surprise, surprise) are running Windows.

Hmmm… wonder how often they need to be re-booted; and with between 2000 and 9000 processors, how long does it take???

An amazing 316 of the top 500 were delivered this year, so the business of building supercomputers is clearly alive and well.  At the other end of the scale, the oldest system, Japan’s “Earth Simulator,” built in 2002, is still holding down position 51.

Returning to where I opened this article, there are 4 identical Hewlett-Packard Cluster Platform 3000 BL2x220 systems each with 2,496 processors running (an unidentified) Linux ranked at 221 to 224.  I’m wondering what these are for; since they were only installed this year and obviously weren’t part of “Lord of the Rings” or “King Kong.”

Peter Jackson, are you listening?  Enquiring minds want to know.