Atlantic Linux Blog

The top 10 supercomputers in the world run Linux

Pingdom (a Swedish uptime monitoring company) took the results of the latest Top500.org list (Top500 is a site that publishes a list, usually twice a year, of the top-performing supercomputers in the world where the performance is ranked against the LINPACK benchmark) and published a study of what operating systems the top 20 supercomputers in world are running. It turns out that 19 of the top 20 are running some form of Linux (with the top 10 all running Linux).

While most of you reading this probably don’t plan on purchasing a supercomputer on the scale of Roadrunner or Jaguar in the near future (if you do, we’d love to assist you in the process) our own experience with deploying smaller HPC clusters for organisations is that Linux is equally suitable for smaller clusters for a variety of reasons including the cost of deployment, the flexibility of Linux as a server OS, the wide range of HPC software that is developed on or targetted at the Linux operating system and the excellent support provided by the Linux community for new hardware (see the recent announcement of Linux being the first operating to support USB 3.0 devices as a good example).

Tags: clusters, hpc, linux, supercomputer