TOP500 Supercomputer: Το Linux κυριαρχεί στο supercomputing. Το 1998, το Linux εμφανίστηκε για πρώτη φορά στη λίστα TOP500 Supercomputer. Σήμερα, τελικά συνέβη: Και οι 500 από τους ταχύτερους supercomputers in the world running Linux.
The last two systems that do not have Linux are two IBM POWER computers in China that run AIX. As they fell from the list of supercomputers of the TOP500 him November of 2017.
In total, China has the most supercomputers with 202 machines, while in the US there are 144. China also beats the US in overall performance. China's supercomputers account for 35,4% of the Top500 computers, followed by the US with 29,6% and it looks like the United States will continue to see its technological decline.
When the first Top500 supercomputer list was created in June 1993, Linux was a game. He had not yet adopted Tux as his mascot. After a while, however, Linux began its path to supercomputer.
In 1993-1994, at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Donald Becker and Thomas Sterling designed the Commodity Off The Shelf (COTS) supercomputer: Beowulf. Unable to afford traditional supercomputers, they built a computer consisting of 16 Intel 486 DX4 processors, which were connected via Ethernet. The Beowulf supercomputer was top notch!
To this day, the Beowulf design remains a popular, inexpensive way to design supercomputers.
Ever since it first appeared in the Top500 in 1998, Linux has seemed to be pulling to the top. Before it took the lead, Unix dominated supercomputing, until 2004, when Linux took the lead.
"Linux became the driving force behind breakthroughs in computing power that fueled research and technological innovation," says Top500.org's linux foundation. In other words, Linux dominates supercomputing because it helps researchers push the limits of computing power.
This happened for two reasons:
First, most of its top supercomputers world είναι ερευνητικά μηχανήματα κατασκευασμένα για εξειδικευμένα καθήκοντα, και κάθε μηχανή είναι ένα αυτόνομο project με μοναδικά χαρακτηριστικά και απαιτήσεις optimizations.
To save money, no one wants to develop their own custom functional system for each of these systems. With Linux, however, research groups can very easily modify and optimize the open Linux source code to exactly what they need.
Για παράδειγμα, το νέο Linux 4.14 επιτρέπει στους υπερυπολογιστές να χρησιμοποιούν τη διαχείριση ετερογενών μνημών (από το Heterogeneous Memory Management ή HMM). Αυτό επιτρέπει στις μονάδες GPU και CPU να έχουν πρόσβαση σε ένα κοινόχρηστο χώρο διευθύνσεων μιας διεργασίας. Έτσι οι 102 της λίστας του Top500 χρησιμοποιούν τώρα την τεχνολογία GPU επιταχυντή – συνε-επεξεργαστή (GPU accelerator/co-processor ) για καλύτερες επιδόσεις, χάρη στο HMM.
Equally important, as pointed out by the Linux Foundation:
"The cost of licensing a custom, self-supporting Linux distribution is the same whether you use 20 nodes or 20 million nodes."
Έτσι, “με την αξιοποίηση της τεράστιας κοινότητας ανοιχτού κώδικα του Linux, τα projects είχαν πρόσβαση σε δωρεάν πconditions supportand developers to keep developer costs on par with or below other operating systems.”
Now that Linux has reached the pinnacle of supercomputing (data from the TOP500 Supercomputer), we probably won't see it lose its dominance anytime soon.
It will take some hardware revolution, such as quantum computing, to change the list. Of course, Linux may still dominate as IBM developers are already working to port Linux to quantum computers.
