So you're telling me that there was a Mac super computer in '05?
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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If I recall correctly they linked a bunch of powermacs together with FireWire.
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.
Ah hahahaha!!!!
Windows! Some dumbass put Windows on a supercomputer!
Probably need one, just for the benchmark comparisons.
Wait what Mac?
Mac is a flavor of Unix, not that surprising really.
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.
Mac is also also derived from BSD since it is built on Darwin
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
Wha?
(searches interwebs)
Wow, that completely passed me by...
I think it was PS3 that shipped with "Other OS" functionality, and were sold a little cheaper than production costs would indicate, to make it up on games.
Only thing is, a bunch of institutions discovered you could order a pallet of PS3's, set up Linux, and have a pretty skookum cluster for cheap.
I'm pretty sure Sony dropped "Other OS" not because of vague concerns of piracy, but because they were effectively subsidizing supercomputers.
Don't know if any of those PS3 clusters made it onto Top500.
Oh Xserve, we hardly knew ye 😢
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?
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.
but it did not stick.
Yeah. It was bad. The job of a Supercomputer is to be really fast and really parallel. Windows for Supercomputing was... not.
I honestly thought it might make it, considering the engineering talent that Microsoft had.
But I think time proves that Unix and Linux just had an insurmountable head start. Windows, to the best of my knowledge, never came close to closing the gap.
But, surely Windows is the wrong OS?
Windows is a per-user GUI... supercomputing is all about crunching numbers, isn't it?
I can understand M$ trying to get into this market and I know Windows server can be used to run stuff, but again, you don't need a GUI on each node a supercomputer they'd be better off with DOS...?
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
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.
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 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.
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.
Would the one made out of playstations be in this statistic?
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.
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.
We're gonna take the test, and we're gonna keep taking it until we get one hundred percent in the bitch!
What would the other be
Thanks for the links!
TempleOS
a glowie's worst nightmare
Praise be upon him
When you really have to look deep into god's mind you just have to put templeOS on a supercomputer.
If you install TempleOS on the fastest supercomputer Frontier, you get Event Horizon.
WARNING: Gory, disturbing picture
Do NOT network-enable TempleOS.
God will get angry if you do.
What movie/tv show is this image from?
Event Horizon