LWN.net Logo

Advertisement

E-Commerce & credit card processing - the Open Source way!

Advertise here

How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers? (NewsForge)

How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers? (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 26, 2005 18:15 UTC (Mon) by jwb (subscriber, #15467)
Parent article: How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers? (NewsForge)

Even for new non-cluster supercomputer designs, I suspect Linux will eventually be the chosen operating system, if only because you have to start somewhere, and Linux is a great place to start. Suppose you had designed a shiny new shared-everything massively parallel vector architecture and needed an operating system to run thereon. You could write your own of course, or you could try to convince IBM or Sun to port theirs. But why not start with Linux? It is portable and can deal with huge number of CPUs and vast I/O capabilities. And, since Linux is GPL, you can hack it to pieces to fit your needs.

Unless these new supercomputers are radically incompatible with the Unix operating model, I'd bet on Linux eventually dominating the market.


(Log in to post comments)

How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers? (NewsForge)

Posted Nov 22, 2005 15:16 UTC (Tue) by hjf (guest, #34031) [Link]

> Even for new non-cluster supercomputer designs, I suspect Linux
> will eventually be the chosen operating system, if only because
> you have to start somewhere, and Linux is a great place to start.
> Suppose you had designed a shiny new shared-everything massively
> parallel vector architecture and needed an operating system to
> run thereon. You could write your own of course, or you could try
> to convince IBM or Sun to port theirs. But why not start with Linux?
> It is portable and can deal with huge number of CPUs and vast I/O
> capabilities. And, since Linux is GPL, you can hack it to pieces to
> fit your needs.
>
> Unless these new supercomputers are radically incompatible with the
> Unix operating model, I'd bet on Linux eventually dominating the market.

Perhaps not. Have you looked at opensolaris.org lately?
Not GPL, uses CDDL, but already more scalable today than
Linux.

Copyright © 2008, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds