RandomGS310TIL that all of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers run on Linux.
If you look at it logically, it only makes sense.
With these Supercomputers, you often run on very specialized Hardware which you have to write costum kernels and drivers for, and if you arent willing to spend millions to get Microsoft to support it, your only other Option is Linux really
Not really, we are not in the eighties anymore, modern supercomputers are mainly a bunch of off the shelf servers connected together
So is it just hundreds of servers, each running their own OS and coordinating on tasks?
Some have thousands but yes.on most of these systems :
- Process launch and scheduling is done by a resource manager (SLURM is common)
- Inter process communication uses an MPI implementation (like OpenMPI)
- These inter node communications uses a low latency (and high bandwidth) network. This is dominated by Infiniband from Nvidia (formerly Mellanox)
What’s really peculiar in modern IT, is that it often use old school Unix multi user management. Users connect to the system through SSH with their own username, use a POSIX filesystem and their processes are executed with their own usernames.
There is kernel knobs to pay attention to, but generally standard RHEL kernels are used.
This is called a “Cluster” and it precedes Linux by a decade or two, but yes.
And what else would the supercomputers run on? Windows? You won’t get into the tops if half your computers are bluescreening while the other half is busy updating…
The times when supercomputers were batch-oriented machines where your calculation was the only thing that was running on the hardware, with your software basically including the OS (or at least the parts that you needed) are long over.