3mo ago

OS market share in Top 500 supercomputers

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer_operating_system
Author: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Benedikt.Seidl
Data from: http://top500.org/stats

161 comments

Ah hahahaha!!!!
Windows! Some dumbass put Windows on a supercomputer!
- Prob Microsoft themselves
  
  Ironically, even Microsoft uses Linux in its Azure datacenters, iirc
  
  Good point.
  But still, the 30% efficient supercomputer.
- Probably need one, just for the benchmark comparisons.
- 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 ~~interface~~ to os."
  edit: fixed redundacy.
- And Mac! Whatever that means 🤣

So basically, everybody switched from expensive UNIX™ to cheap "unix"-in-all-but-trademark-certification once it became feasible, and otherwise nothing has changed in 30 years.
- Except this time the Unix-like took 100% of the market
  Was too clear this thing is just better
  
  BSD is mostly Unix too, so even if Unix didn't have 100% because of mac and Windows it was like 99%

So you're telling me that there was a Mac super computer in '05?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(supercomputer)
  G5
  Oof, in only a couple years it was worthless.
  
  Also known as Big Mac
  haha
- If I recall correctly they linked a bunch of powermacs together with FireWire.
  
  It apparently later was transitioned to Xserves
- Funnily enough is was known for being quite cheap

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
  
  Oh Xserve, we hardly knew ye 😢
  
  3rd fastest
  And 1st tastiest
- 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.

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
- 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
- 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.
  
  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

Surprised to learn that there were windows based Supercomputers.
- Those were the basic entry level configurations needed to run Windows Vista with Aero effects.
  
  Meh, you just needed a discrete GPU, and not even a good one either. Just a basic, bare-bones card with 128MB of VRAM and pixel shader 2.0 support would have sufficed, but sadly most users didn't even have that back in 06-08.
  It was mostly the consumer's fault for buying cheap garbage laptops with trash-tier iGPUs in them, and the manufacturer's for slapping a "compatible with Vista" sticker on them and pushing those shitboxes on consumers. If you had a half-decent $700-800 PC then, Vista ran like a dream.

I saw the thumbnail and thought this was a map of The Netherlands
- One of the Top 500 supercountries
  
  Technically accurate

"Is your UNIX Linux compatible?"

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.
  
  Linux isn't a UNIX flavor. It's UNIX-like.

Would the one made out of playstations be in this statistic?
- 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.
- 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.

Now the real question is what package manager are they using? apt or yum? Lol

Maybe windows is not used in supercomputers often because unix and linux is more flexiable for the cpus they use(Power9,Sparc,etc)
- More importantly, they can't adapt Windows to their needs.
  
  Yep the other reason.
- That's certainly a big part of it. When one needs to buy a metric crap load of CPUs, one tends to shop outside the popular defaults.
  Another big reason, historically, is that Supercomputers didn't typically have any kind of non-command-line way to interact with them, and Windows needed it.
  Until PowerShell and Windows 8, there were still substantial configuration options in Windows that were 100% managed by graphical packages. They could be changed by direct file edits and registry editing, but it added a lot of risk. All of the "did I make a mistake" tools were graphical and so unavailable from command line.
  So any version of Windows stripped down enough to run on any super-computer cluster was going to be missing a lot of features, until around 2006.
  Since Linux and Unix started as command line operating systems, both already had plenty fully featured options for Supercomputing.
- Plus Linux doesn't limit you in the number of drives, whereas Windows limits you from A to Z.
  
  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.
  
  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)
  
  Ok that would make sense tbh

We're gonna take the test, and we're gonna keep taking it until we get one hundred percent in the bitch!

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 my impression is 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.

What would the other be
- TempleOS
  
  When you really have to look deep into god's mind you just have to put templeOS on a supercomputer.
  
  Praise be upon him
- You mean the NA/Mixed category?
  Probably mostly z/OS and BS2000.
  Or actually a mix between Linux and Unix.
  
  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?
  
  Thanks for the links!

Can we get a source for this image?
- Wikipedia
- Sure. Added it to the post.

I’m confused on why they separate BSD from Unix. BSD is a Unix variant.
- 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).
  
  But OS X, macOS, and at least one Linux distro are/were UNIX certified.
- 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.
  
  Others have answered, but it is interesting to know the history of UNIX and why this came to be. BSD is technically UNIX derived, but being more specific isn't the reason why it has distinct branding. As with many evils the root is money, and there's a lot in play into how it all happened, including AT&T being a phone monopoly.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc._v._Berkeley_Software_Design,_Inc.
  And I recommend watching this video informative and funny about the history and drama behind it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7tvI6JCXD0
- So is Linux. So I guess the light blue is all other UNIX variants?
  
  no, it's not

Just need to do a dnf update on them all...

Any idea how it'd look if broken down into distros? I'm assuming enterprise support would be favoured so Red Hat or Ubuntu would dominate?
- The previously fastest ran on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the current fastest runs on SUSE Enterprise Linux.
  The current third fastest (owned by Microsoft) runs Ubuntu. That's as far as I care to research.
  
  current fastest runs on SUSE Enterprise Linux
  No wayyy! Why SUSE tho?
- I can't imagine Supercomputers to use a mainstream operating system such as Ubuntu. But clearly people even put Windows on it, so I shouldn't be surprised...
  
  They do use Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE mostly.
  But for customers like that, the companies are of course willing to adjust the distro to their needs, with full support.
  Microsoft uses their own Linux distro now.

Interesting how the tiny BSD fraction had a lead over Linux in 1995

161 comments