Windows rules on the desktop, but if you want serious performance, there's only one choice: Linux.
As The 451 Group captures in a great write-up of the most recent Top500 report of the world's fastest supercomputers, Linux is the default choice for 85 percent of the world's fastest computers. Windows? It can barely scrape together 1 percent market share.
(Credit:
Top500)
The world's fastest supercomputer, built by IBM, uses the xCAT distributed computing management and provisioning tool, created by Egan Ford (a friend and IBM's supercomputer guru). The good news for Microsoft? It's open source. Microsoft can use it, too!
Of course, Microsoft would have to switch to Linux first, but that's a small sacrifice to be part of the club generating serious performance for customers, right? Right?!? :-)
At one time, Linux Networx was one of the industry's premier open-source players. I personally kicked the tires on joining and loved the innovative work it was doing. Yesterday the company, which has struggled the past few years through painful venture funding rounds and increased industry competition, tied the knot with SGI.
Or, rather, its assets did. Not much was left to sell to SGI
It's a rough business. Linux Networx used to have 15 supercomputers to its credit (on the list of Top 500 Supercomputers) but now has nine. It's the nature of the beast: you're tops one minute and falling down the list the next. It's also hard to make significant margin in supercomputing because the competition is so fierce.
I have friends at Linux Networx and wish them well. SGI, whose best days are likely past, is not where I'd want them to land, but at least it will be somewhat more stable than Linux Networx has been the past few years. Maybe.
In a sign that the web world finally recognizes its debt to open source, Yahoo is opening up an advanced research and development center - with a massive computing lab - to allow developers and researchers to test their systems software. In other words, Yahoo is opening up one of its labs to let people experiment with Yahoo/Internet-scale applications.
This is very cool.
Sunnyvale-based Yahoo said the program is intended to leverage its leadership in Hadoop, an open source distributed computing sub-project of the Apache Software Foundation, to enable researchers to modify and evaluate the systems software running on a 4,000 processor supercomputer provided by Yahoo.
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