Windows Cluster Hits a Petaflop, But Linux Retains Top-5 Spot 229
Twice a year, Top500.org publishes a list of supercomputing benchmarks from sites around the world; the new results are in. Reader jbrodkin writes "Microsoft says a Windows-based supercomputer has broken the petaflop speed barrier, but the achievement is not being recognized by the group that tracks the world's fastest supercomputers, because the same machine was able to achieve higher speeds using Linux. The Tokyo-based Tsubame 2.0 computer, which uses both Windows and Linux, was ranked fourth in the world in the latest Top 500 supercomputers list. While the computer broke a petaflop with both operating systems, it achieved a faster score with Linux, denying Microsoft its first official petaflop ranking."
Also in Top-500 news, reader symbolset writes with word that "the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin takes the top spot with 2.57 petaflops. Although the US has long held a dominant position in the list things now seem to be shifting, with two of the top spots held by China, one by Japan, and one by the US. In the Operating System Family category Linux continues to consolidate its supercomputing near-monopoly with 91.8% of the systems — up from 91%. High Performance Computing has come a long way quickly. When the list started as a top-10 list in June of 1993 the least powerful system on the list was a Cray Y-MP C916/16526 with 16 cores driving 13.7 RMAX GFLOP/s. This is roughly the performance of a single midrange laptop today."
Petaflops per second? (Score:5, Interesting)
2.57 petaflops per second
floating point operations per second per second?
Re:Petaflops per second? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd say Google datacenters accelerate at about that rate.
Re:Petaflops per second? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not sure that Google's data centres could qualify as a single super computer with each node solving a different part of the same problem...
World domination isn't a single problem?
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Erm...yes thats how clusters work. Its not possible to build a single machine fast enough to solve many problems.
Re:Petaflops per second? (Score:5, Funny)
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Check the flop in your pants. It's never shipped anything.
I know for sure that it hasn't, I don't have to check. Given my seasickness, I would immediately notice any attempt at getting into maritime cargo transport business on my flop's part.
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Not the sales they're reporting at least.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=4XPMLS5U3OEIRQE1GHRSKH4ATMY32JVN?articleID=228200850&pgno=2&queryText=&isPrev= [informationweek.com]
Microsoft's most recent Windows sales totals got a boost from the fact the company quietly added revenues it previously assigned to other groups to its operating systems unit, a bit of accounting legerdemain that, along with other bookkeeping moves, helped the Windows group post big gains in the past quarter,
Windows sales from the OEM channel, which account for 75% of all Windows sales, increased just 11% year-over-year when the deferral program is considered. Not bad, but it's pretty much in line with most estimates for overall PC market growth during the period, including Microsoft's own.
To boot, data from market watcher Net Applications shows Windows has actually lost more than 1% of market share since last December, though it still commands more than 91% of the PC OS market.
Microsoft is running scared and cooking their books. Ballmer knows - he's dumping 30% of his Microsoft shares [usatoday.com].
They're heading for an Enron for sure...
lies damn lies and software licensing (Score:2)
The thing with MS is they won't sell you licenses to their older products but they WILL sell you volume licenses to their newer proucts that include "downgrade rights".
So sales get chalked up as sales of the latest version whatever version the customer actually uses.
Things are even worse for normal consumers who usually don't get the option of downgrading.
Re:Petaflops per second? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm willing to bet that the top end is going to become less and less relevant and we're going to be judging processors more and more by the "flops-per-watt" and "flops-per-dollar" rating. We're already in a position where clusters of commercial games machines make more sense than a traditional supercomputer for many applications, and I dread to think how much energy could be harvested from these using some efficient heat exchangers.
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Typos are accidental, this is just the result of ignorance.
Re:Petaflops per second? (Score:5, Funny)
2.57 petaflops per second
floating point operations per second per second?
Well-spotted. It appears that this particular supercomputer gets faster the longer it is left running. Clearly the reason that it ran faster with Linux than with Windows was because in the latter case it needed to be restarted after every Patch Tuesday, thus limiting the potential speed increase to 6.88 zettaflops.
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thus limiting the potential speed increase to 6.88 zettaflops.
If it could become a million times faster by installing Windows, there's something very very wrong with the world.
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"What is: the speed of a supercomputer falling off a cliff?"
Trebeck: "That's correct. You select next."
"I'll take: 'Bad jokes' for 1,000, Alex."
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Actually, flops [wikipedia.org] means exactly what the OP said: Floating point operations per second.
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Dual boots? (Score:4, Funny)
So it dual boots? press the option key or something to get into Windows and play Crysis?
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This machine is probable capable of playing Crysis with a framerate higher that 20fps
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Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
Even more interesting is the fact that GPGPU accelerated supercomputers are clearly outclassing classical supercomputers such as Cray
Funny that you mention Cray, as the Cray-1 [wikipedia.org] was the first supercomputer with vector processors [wikipedia.org], what GPGPUs actually are.
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Funny that you mention Cray, as the Cray-1 [wikipedia.org] was the first supercomputer with vector processors [wikipedia.org], what GPGPUs actually are.
Cray-1 date of birth 1976
CDC Star-100 date of birth 1974 (not a stellar business/economic/PR success, but it technically worked)
ILLIAC IV design was completed in 1966. Implementation, however, had some problems. Debatable, but sort of true to say it was first booted up in 1972 but wasn't completely debugged for a couple years. As if there has ever been a completely debugged system.
Thats the problem with "first", theres so many of them.
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I went by "The vector technique was first fully exploited in the famous Cray-1" from the wikipedia :)
Apparently the difference between the CDC Star-100 and the Cray-1 is the adressing mode : Star-100 fetched and stored data in main memory while the Cray-1 had 64 64-bit registers.
On the account of ILLIAC IV, Wikipedia says it "was finally ready for operation in 1976". It booted in 1972, but wasn't reliable enough to run applications at that time. It was usable in 1975, operating only Monday to Friday and hav
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Well part of the problem is that the definition of supercomptuer has become a little blurred, in particular with regards to the top500. Many things people are calling supercomputers really aren't, they are clusters. Now big clusters are fine, there are plenty of uses for them. However there are problems that they are not good at solving. In clusters, processors don't have access to memory on other nodes, they have to send over the data. So long as things are pretty independent, you can break down the proble
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Nope. GPUs are just today's version of the FPUs in the 90s. Right now, they're a feature omitted in most systems, with software emulation taking up the s
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You will NOT be seeing a gtx480 equivalent in your cpu die any time soon.
From a thermal and 'oh dear god so many transistors' perspective it's pretty much impossible since as process improvements occur the gpu's just use more transistors to suit.
Fpu's were a drop in the bucket compare to modern decent gpu's
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No you won't. AMD's original idea was to have an SMP motherboard, with an Opteron in one socket, and a GPU in another. This would be eminently doable with a GTX 480, and anything else you can name. FPUs had their own sockets to start with, too.
These days, having a GPU as a seperate core on a chip would be the expected way to go, and there's no reason that couldn't happen. Sure, it's a lot of transistors, but with entirely separate
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Your nostalgia is showing. The latest Crays don't immerse their boards in flouronert. They aren't hand connected by teams of unusually small weavers. They don't use chips clocked ten times faster than anyone else's. They aren't physically small. They do, however, have nifty interconnects-- which probably explains why Jaguar is 75% efficient, and Tianhe-1A is 54% efficient.
Rate of processing power increase (Score:2)
The last two sentences on the summary are the most interesting ones. If you thought that the rate of growth of memory and processing power on standard home/office computers is out of hand just look at the supercomputers. These things are basicly old when delivered and their life is practically max. 3-5 years, after that nobody cares. And that is a pity considering how much these beasts cost and they are mostly funded with public (tax) money because running a business selling processor time from these things
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Pretty sure Render Farms have the same obsolescence problem and there are businesses that depend on them.
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Not really. Yes, there is something of an arms race for the top500, but even after the top500 no longer lists a system it will almost certainly still be in use by someone for practical purposes other than benchmarking.
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The weather institute had the most powerful supercomputer in this (small) country. It was not that old, but it was time to upgrade. The new supercomputer was now the fastest supercomputer and the old one became the second fastest.
What happened to the second fastest supercomputer in the country? It was scraped. They could not afford to keep running it due to cost of powering it. They could not sell or give it away, because the economics of it did not add up. Anyone needing such computing power were better of
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I'm going to guess that the old supercomputer used Pentium 4s. An old Core2 system is probably still OK, but P4 systems are only good if your heaters need upgrading.
Time To Hump It! (Score:2)
The US had best take the processor speed race very seriously. Who knows what kind of either military or economic domination might get a leg up with super computers? And once on top it can take a century or two to dislodge a leader in technology.
Wow! (Score:2)
Finally a Windows box capable of running Duke Nukem Forever!
I need one (Score:3, Interesting)
I need one so I can recalculate my budget spreadsheet in a femtosecond. These nanosecond pauses are getting old.
On a lighter note, so, why isn't this stuff changing our lives? I remember in the late 90's I read a story about how gigaflop computing would revolutionize aeronautics, allowing the full simulation of weird new configurations of aircraft that would be quantum leaps over what we had. Er, have.
Can I answer my own question? I mean, can I answer two of my questions? No, make that three now. Anyway, my perspective is that the kinds of engineers who have the knowledge required to write this kind of software aren't software engineers. In fact, aeronautics is rife with some of the most horrifying software imaginable. Much of it being Excel macros. Seriously. I wrote some of it.
Re:I need one (Score:4, Funny)
This is why Windows HPC is going to change everything
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I agree with you. In fact, you could say we have been making the same airliner over and over since the 707. A tube with swept wings and either two or four engines on the wing. "Revolutionary" means 2% faster or 10% lighter. There is a whole global infrastructure dedicated to making these tubes and wings.
However, I stand by my belief that engineering software is trapped in a time bubble. In 1985 I learned Patran and Nastran. These days I use...Patran and Nastran. Maybe the big shift has been from sol 101 to
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The 380 is a triumph of industrial synthesis, not aerodynamics. The 787 is similar, though not so triumphant.
Computer aided design (read: CATIA) increases productivity an order of magnitude more than performance. Case in point, instead of physically mocking up all the harnesses for an airplane like the 380, we now do that digitally. But that is just geometric modeling (and kinematic, but not dynamic). And we still get it wrong. The 380's wiring was laid out wrong and that was never caught until someone tr
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So why would anyone want to do this? (Score:5, Informative)
I do scientific high-performance computing, and there is simply no reason anyone would want to run Windows on a supercomputer.
Linux has native, simple support for compiling the most common HPC languages (C and Fortran). It is open source and extensively customizable, so it's easy to make whatever changes need to be made to optimize the OS on the compute nodes, or optimize the communication latency between nodes. Adding support for exotic filesystems (like Lustre) is simple, especially since these file systems are usually developed *for* Linux. It has a simple, robust, scriptable mechanism for transferring large amounts of data around (scp/rsync) and a simple, unified mechanism for working remotely (ssh). Linux (the whole OS) can be compiled separately from source to optimize for a particular architecture (think Gentoo).
What advantage does Windows bring to a HPC project?
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The only "advantage" is when you're defaulted to Windows because an ISV has a required shrink wrap application available only for Windows.
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Duh. Obviously to run Crysis.
Excel spreadsheets for banking and stock exchange (Score:3, Informative)
You will probably laugh but banks and finances do not: Excel spreadsheets.
Microsoft HPC solution allows distribute it across many nodes.
Trust me: *huge* money are there (alas, not for you, not for me and not for science).
It's much cheaper for a bank to rent a supercomputer to calculate a heavy spreadsheet written by programming-challenged but money-wise CPA then to hire a money-challenged, HPC-wise guy to rewrite (and perpetually modify it on a short notice) this spreadsheet to FORTRAN.
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Any other application built for windows has the same issue.
I work for a company doing modeling for insurance, and the software for catastrophe modeling (RMS, AIR, Eqecat,) all are windows only. The simulations and models take days to run for a large data set, and the software/modeling companies aren't about to switch off of windows for the software licensed from them, and there is nowhere else to go.
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As a professional HPC programmer, using "days to run for a large data set" is absolutely meaningless to me.
Define large. Means different things to different people.
Re:So why would anyone want to do this? (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the big developments of late has been in data mining of the data from your ERP system / data warehouse to answer questions about your clients/business and to find interesting patterns in your data. Couple this with the fact that buisinesses are trying to retain more and more data in a live database to make this data mining more deep/interesting and the needs for massive database servers with the power to run some crazy complex queries/reports is on the rise.
The popular example of this sort of thing in Wal-Mart who retain everything in an electronic form and can do scary things like see pictures of you based on correlating their digital security footage with your credit card purchase at a point in time at a particular register or track the differences in sales of individual products during unusual events like Hurricanes etc.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/14/2057228 [slashdot.org]
Many businesses run Microsoft SQL Server as the backend for their ERP system and/or as their primary database. This would allow them to build a nice little HPC system to do the sorts of scary things with massive amounts of data that they have been wanting to do. I end with this funny cartoon on the subject.
http://onefte.com/2010/09/21/target-markets/ [onefte.com]
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Also, MS produces a much better integrated and more functional development environment that anything available in the FOSS world.
They're nowhere near the level of depth in the HPC world that linux has, but if they can do for parallel programming what VB did for programming generally (make is accesible to non-programmer domain experts) then it could be a compelling alternative.
If you want that, then you're probably looking for either X10 [codehaus.org] or Chapel [cray.com] which offer a huge leap forward in making massive scale parallel programming simpler and easier. Of course X10 is from IBM and has Eclipse and plugins as the dev environment, and the closest they offer to a Windows version of the compiler is one compiled against cygwin. Chapel is from Cray, and has practically no Windows support, save for a claim that you can get it working with cygwin. Both languages are excellently supported on Linux
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For HPC clusters, wouldn't you want something simple like a NIS domain? What advantage does Windows offer here? Further, what parallel programming support does Microsoft offer?
And, since the nodes in the cluster are headless anyway, and the code is going to be written to POSIX and MP standards anyway, what advantage does Microsoft offer AT ALL compared to Linux or BSD?
Linux, of course, offers early adopter support in this area. It tends to prevail simply because of the other clusters. You know it can work,
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If you don't want encryption do not use SSH, there are other ways to move files.
Anti-American Bias? (Score:2)
The summary clearly states "Linux retains a spot in the top-5", then goes on to say that China has 2 "top spots", with America and Japan only having one spot a piece. And while that may be true if you limit it to a "top-4", America is tied with China if you count the number 5 position. So why does the OP pull this slight of hand, only counting the top 4 as the "top spots" after making reference to the "top-5" as the measure of top positions? Looks like bias to me.
This is all good and fine... (Score:3, Funny)
Human Brain power reached (approx) (Score:2)
Top machine: 2500 x 10^12 floating point ops x 64 bits = 160 x 10^15 bits per second
Human brain: 10^11 neurons x 10^4 synapses x 100 Hz firing rate = 100 x 10^15 bits per second.
I am not saying it will wake up tomorrow and launch Skynet, but until now inadequate hardware was a barrier to human-level AI.
And yes, I am quite aware that a synapse firing is not directly comparable to a binary bit. Call this a rough comparison.
MS denied first Petaflop how, exactly? (Score:2)
From the article:
If the machine broke a petaflop with both operating systems (Linux and Windows), how was it denied an official Petaflop ranking? It achieved it, why doesn't it count? Is each machine only allowed one ranking? Seems sort of odd, the ranking of the same machine with different OSs would be interesting, no?
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Re:About hardware, not operating systems (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it says the hardware ran linux at X speed, and windows at less than X speed...
Actually the article doesn't say that. The hardware was different: the Linux configuration had more nodes than the Windows configuration. This *might* have been for some technical reason, or it might have been for some extraneous reason (e.g., they have better things to do with this beast than run benchmarks on it).
In any case, the difference between the Windows and Linux scores was for practical purposes insignificant. It was a *benchmark*, not a real computation. Even if the benchmark is pretty good, the mix of resources used by a real program won't match it exactly (e.g. an app that uses less floating point calculations but more memory allocations might see a very different result).
Microsoft's aim is not to run on research clusters, but to make inroads into businesses that have in-house Windows system administration and programming capabilities and might have use for high performance computing. If so, the linpack benchmark is probably close to irrelevant for many applications.
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Well... "being able to run more nodes" is also a function of software. It's called scalability.
Being able to throw more nodes at a problem would certainly be a "feature" for HPC.
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From TFA: "I'm not sure why the tests were run on a different number of nodes".
No one anywhere, except in your imagination, said Windows wasn't *able* to run on the extra nodes.
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No one anywhere, except in your imagination, said Windows wasn't *able* to run on the extra nodes.
I figure it was because the testers couldn't afford the licensing fees.
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And you know for a fact that they hadn't added nodes to the cluster between when they ran it on windows and on linux, or that some nodes weren't down for service or other maintenance, moving, or a million other potential reasons?
I don't pretend to know why when I don't. You pretend to know why when you don't.
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Microsoft's aim is not to run on research clusters, but to make inroads into businesses that have in-house Windows system administration and programming capabilities and might have use for high performance computing. If so, the linpack benchmark is probably close to irrelevant for many applications.
It's not a smart aim. Programmers who make clustered apps are a different skill set from the programmers who make most of the software out there and if your average programmer attempts it the result will not scale no matter what resources you throw at the project and this is on top of the fact that only a subset of software problems are suited to clustering to begin with.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that even in the Linux case the benchmark scales better than most software that will run on a cl
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>The hardware was different: the Linux configuration had more nodes than the Windows configuration.
I RTFA but that claim is not confirmed.
Anyway if they wanted to test linux vs windows they would have run on the same n. of nodes disabling linux ones. Pretty strange they did not, maybe some NDA or some phb which needs a case for
win deployment?
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Isn't this about hardware, not operating systems (other than the OS being able to support the hardware)?
No, it is about two operating systems on the same hardware, one of which (GNU/Linux) outperforming the other (Windows).
And isn't the hardware simply about how much money you have to throw at it?
No, it is also about the architectural choices.
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Isn't this about hardware, not operating systems (other than the OS being able to support the hardware)?
No, it is about two operating systems on the same hardware, one of which (GNU/Linux) outperforming the other (Windows).
And isn't the hardware simply about how much money you have to throw at it?
No, it is also about the architectural choices.
Architectural choices are irrelevant if you don't have the funding to realize them.
If you can't afford the hardware to your fancy supercomputer, you can make the best possible choices in the word, but you're still not getting a supercomputer.
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Linux isn't exactly an ultrascalable high-performance OS either. If you were building a supercomputer operating system from the start you'd make very different design decisions than Linus did.
Re:Won't somebody please think of the licensing co (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, what?
Have you ever paid attention to the OS trends in the Top500? All the proprietary OSes are disappearing. It used to be nearly all proprietary Unix and BSD. Now it's 91 percent Linux.
Here's a graph showing the demise of Unix in the Top500
http://www.top500.org/overtime/list/36/osfam [top500.org]
Linux doesn't scale? It fits in toasters and supercomputers. I think that's pretty good scaling if you ask me.
You could probably make the argument in 1991 when Linus smote the ground and came up with the kernel, but not anymore. You could probably even make that argument before kernel 2.0. But since then? Claiming that Linux doesn't scale well just makes you look like a Microsoft fanboy whistling while walking past the graveyard at best.
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BMO
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What the hell kind of toaster runs Linux? There's hardly any justification for a mass-produced toaster to have any logic more complex than a relay. If there's an actual consumer toaster out there on the market that has linux controlling it, I'd like to see it (and buy it)!
No, you need NetBSD for that [embeddedarm.com].
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My toaster needs an update, if it has an OS (Score:3)
This toaster uses what look pretty much like toner fusing light bars to toast/cook. It is really fast, and gives off a nice evil glow when it is working.
The only problem with it is that you can sometimes confuse it into a very dangerous state - i.e. it can go FULL ON, and the "off" switch has no effect. In this state the door-interlock switch
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Linux is and always has been designed with extreme outward AND upward scaling in mind
>always
You conveniently snipped "you could have made that argument..."
Your argument is not only existentially fallacious, but you put words in my mouth.
Cunt.
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BMO
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Mostly because of development costs.
Much cheaper to work with linux than build a new one from scratch.
Re:Won't somebody please think of the licensing co (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just like a jet-engine is a great way to power a huge aircraft, no so great for powering your lawn mower or chain saw.
Maybe you don't have a jet-powered lawn mower [gp3.co.uk], but maybe you're just not that serious about your yard work.
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Yet, it works fine on phones and android is outselling others. Almost like their might be something special about the desktop market, some sort of market tampering by a player or two.
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If you were building a supercomputer operating system from the start you'd make very different design decisions than Linus did.
Heh, one of those "start clean and it'll be so much better". There's been a kazillion patches to Linux to make it scale better, if there was anything essential holding it back they'd fork and run their own supercomputer-linux. Yes, you would use very different design decisions, but those Linux made in the early 90s aren't longer in effect either.
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Yeah, but on the downside, it means that asian chicks are going to start gaining weight and wanting to be "liberated" and stuff, so your sexy accent isn't really going to pay off.
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Way to bring politics into a thread about supercomputers!
Now, to politics.... Being a fan of neither large party, I can smugly sit here and point out both of the sides' failings while you and the inevitable others argue which of the two sides is unfit to rule. Sadly, both sides have me convinced the other side sucks.
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Really I thought it was accelerated by the left wing and those environmentalists who say that all new technology is bad and evil, and unwilling to see that life is about balance.
Or...
It could be that China is a country that has the highest population and its new free(er) market economy allows to better utilize its human capital and brain power. As well they are in a culture where when they are competing they will try to win at all costs even in spite of them selfs. While in the US we try hard to win but on
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- What kind of performance can an actual program achieve on Windows on that hardware?
Less than on Linux, and that's what counts in the end, isn't it?
Coupled with the fact that licenses eat into the budget a significant amount, Windows TCO is not the bargain that Microsoft would like you to believe.
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BMO
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I am impressed that Windows can actually scale to that type of hardware. However, my questions are:
- What kind of performance can an actual program achieve on Windows on that hardware?
Fairly good if the programmer is skilled at writing super computer applications.
- Are context switches from godawful slow memory allocation calls as painfully slow on this supercomputer as they are on the typical desktop?
It shouldn't matter too much since they would (mostly) avoid context switches by only running 1 copy of the software per core and half of windows is disabled in Super Computing edition.
- How badly does the ever-essential anti-malware suite drag down the supercomputer?
Shouldn't be needed since it should be extremely hard for malware to get into such a controlled environment to begin with.
There are other reasons Microsoft's idea is a bad one such as the higher licensing costs, no possible reason to want to write
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- How badly does the ever-essential anti-malware suite drag down the supercomputer?
Shouldn't be needed since it should be extremely hard for malware to get into such a controlled environment to begin with.
Digital Fortress?
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- How badly does the ever-essential anti-malware suite drag down the supercomputer?
Shouldn't be needed since it should be extremely hard for malware to get into such a controlled environment to begin with.
Digital Fortress?
Machines only connect to their internal network and only run either Microsoft or in house apps?
To top it off the cluster edition of windows has pretty much all services not even installed in the first place lat alone running so few open ports even if something did make it into the network.
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no possible reason to want to write custom, non GUI software from scratch on Windows
That's a bit excessive! It does have some nice things going for it, including a fairly nice API that's been binary and source compatible for decades. There's end-to-end Unicode support in all APIs, a nice event logging and tracing system, a nice performance monitoring system (WMI), various asynchronous file and socket APIs, including advanced copy-less APIs that can tie TCP streams to specific CPU cores, etc...
Unlike Linux, Windows has a built-in volume snapshot system that supports application quiescing (n
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Not much, but Vista is reasonably snappy.
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"Try asking someone in Europe how important they think it is for Germany, or France or the UK to have a leading position in terms of supercomputing capability. It just doesn't feature on the radar for them."
Well, being Germany the 2nd world's biggest exporter (surpassed only by China some few months ago) maybe they are not all at arts and literature only.
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