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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
They still probably need a ton of customization and tuning at the driver level and beyond, which open source allows for.
I am sure there is plenty of existing "super computer"-grade software in the wild already, but a majority of it probably needs quite a bit of hacking to get running smoothly on newer hardware configurations.
As a matter of speculation, the engineers and scientists that build these things are probably hyper-picky about how some processes execute and need extreme flexibility.
So, I would say it's a combination of factors that make Linux a good choice.
Surprisingly not a lot of 'exciting tuning', a lot of these are exceedingly conservative when it comes to tuning. From a software perspective, the most common "weird" thing in these systems is the affinity for diskless boot, and that's mostly coming from a history of when hard drives used to be a more frequent failure causing downtime (yes, the stateless nature of diskless boot continues to be desired, but the community would have likely never bothered if not for OS HDD failures). They also sometimes like managing the OS kind of like a common chroot to oversimplify, but that's mostly about running hundreds of thousands of what should be the exact same thing over and over again, rather than any exotic nature of their workload.
Linux is largely the choice by virtue of this market evolving from largely Unix based but most applications they used were open source, out of necessity to let them bid, say, Sun versus IBM versus SGI and still keep working regardless of who was awarded the business. In that time frame, Windows NT wasn't even an idea, and most of these institutions wouldn't touch 'freeware' for such important tasks.
In the 90s Linux happened and critically for this market, Red Hat and SUSE happened. Now they could have a much more vibrant and fungible set of hardware vendors with some credible commercial software vendor that could support all of them. Bonus that you could run the distributions or clones for free to help a lot of the smaller academic institutions get a reasonable shot without diverting money from hardware to software. Sure, some aggressively exotic things might have been possible versus the prior norm of proprietary, but mostly it was about the improved vendor-to-vendor consistency.
Microsoft tried to get into this market in the late 2000s, but no one asked for them. They had poor compatibility with any existing code, were more expensive, and much worse at managing at scale in the context of headless, multi-user compute nodes.
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 :
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.
That's it!
I mean, what the first person said is true...
... and what you have just said is true.
There is no tension between these concepts.
Nearly all servers run on linux, nearly all supercomputers are some kind of locally networked cluster... that run linux.
Theres... theres no conflict here.
In fact, this kind of multi computer paradigm for Linux is the core of why X11 is weird and fucky, in the context of a modern, self contained PC, and why Wayland is a thing nowadays.
X11 is built around a paradigm where you have a whole bunch of hardware units doing actual calcs of some kind, and then, some teeny tiny hardware that is basically just a display and input device... well thats the only thing that even needs to load a display or input related code/software/library.
You also don't really need to worry so much about security in the display/input framework itself, because your only potential threat is basically a rogue employee at your lab, and everyone working there is some kind of trained expert.
This makes sense if your scenario is a self contained computer research facility that is only networked to what is in its building...
... it makes less sense and has massive security problems if you have a single machine that can do all of that, and that single machine is also networked to millions of remote devices (via the modern internet), and in a world where computer viruses, malware, are a multi billion dollar industry... and the average computer user is roughly as intelligent and knowledgeable as a 6th grader.
Nah it's to avoid the forced windows reboots /j
The competition wasn't between Linux and Windows, but rather Linux with some dedicated server OSes like Solaris, HP-UX and whatnot — mostly variants of Unix, but idk which ones exactly.
I managed a research cluster for a university for about 10 years. The hardware was largely commodity and not specialized. Unless you call nVidia GPU’s or InfiniBand “specialized”. Linux was the obvious choice because many cluster-aware applications, both open source and commercial, run on Linux.
We even went so far as to integrate the cluster with CERN’s ATLAS grid to share data and compute power for analyzing ATLAS data from the LHC. Virtually all the other grid clusters ran Linux, so that made it much easier to add our cluster to its distributed environment.
Sad BSD noises.
I think one day old accounts should be banned in TIL... It's clearly a karma farmer who is reposting stuff they know we like to hear.
Meh, karma is utterly irrelevant anyway
While I agree, they're doing it to make the account look legitimate for later use.
ｌａｔｅｒ ｕｓｅ ｄｏｉｎｇ ｗｈａｔ？
Its why lemmy only shows posts and comments and not karma unlike Piefed. Karma is irrelevant when it can be easily botted and farmed now.
I think they do this to make accounts look legit when they are astroturfing later.
sorry to burst your bubble
Wait it’s all Linux? 🔫 Always has been…
I once worked on a supercomputer in the olden times - this was before Linux. You basically wrote your calculation application on a front-end system with a cross-compiler. It was then transferred to the target machines' RAM and ran there. Your application was the only thing running on that machine. No OS, no drivers, no interrupts (at least not that I knew of). Just your application directly on the hardware. Once your program was finished, the RAM was read back, and you could analyze the dump to extract your results.
OG
No it's not, other Unix were on the list until 2017, there was even some Windows and macos for a time.
did you think they ran windows server?
I think a more likely alternative with be a BSD or other Unix derivative
I personally thought that they ran some kind of unique fully custom OS
At least the top 10
no link to supercomputer list
They don't actually list OS there, but you can assume it's Linux. Lots of R&D has been done to get Linux to run well on supercomputers, it'd be cost prohibitive to try some other OS.
Long time now. Linux runs almost on every device, not just computers and phones.
I think they are surprised that there aren't any other bespoke or legacy or somewhat exotic OSes being used for any of them. Or maybe BSD or something.
If you put windows on them, they stop being super.
If you put MacOS on them, they stop being computer.
It is said, that once you install windows on them, you would finally be able to use Internet Explorer!
Well yeah, if you have custom or exotic hardware you either customize an existing OS or write one from scratch. First option is much more sensible.
Well they're not gonna use Windows
Well shit now I want to know if quantum computers have operating systems..
And it looks like as of earlier this year the answer to that.. is yes. Special ones. Well, special one so far.
Quantum internet seems like a really bad idea, though, if the regular internet is any indication..
It's not exactly the quantum computers having an OS. Like with supercomputers back in my time, there are more or less normal computers running a more or less normal OS, which has the computational engine as a kind of device. You create and compile your "application" on that host processor, and load the "binary" onto the quantum device and execute it.
Linux is the liberator.