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All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

zdnet.com

61–70 of 206 posts

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#61
post #2

Serious question (not in IT), what else can they run?

They could likely run any of the BSD variants. Some form of commercial RTOS might also be viable. Even Minix might be an option (hire away some of those Intel folks!) though I'm not sure of its hardware support. That said, why bother? Linux is customizable enough to strip out almost everything extraneous for nodes and has the largest pool of experienced developers, and it's unlikely that any of the other options woul…

Why on earth would you want a RTOS for HPC?

RT is all about privileging latency over throughput, whereas in HPC throughput is everything.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#62

I think it's hilarious that so many run CentOS instead of RHEL. Redhat has managed to make their product worse than free with their licensing bullshit.

It makes sense though, because a supercomputer installation is exactly the kind of place you'd expect to have its own experts that support and customise the OS.

And there really aren't that many supercomputer installations, so any that RHEL does have are probably more for the prestige than the revenue.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#63
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investor accreditation makes sense (for now.) Giving poor people free access to untested-investment-vehicle-X is basically the same as giving them over-the-counter access to scheduled drugs. Mistakes will be made, and the people making them—lacking resources as they do—won't be able to recover from them. Right now, we're spending a lot of money trying to figure out how to get people out of these ruts. (Free housing s…

Why I don't see many people in the UK going bankrupt of stockmarket investments opposed to say video poker in the Bookies Its just the Maggie meant what she said about a shareholding democracy And even Sweden has a strong retail shareholdings they even have national organisation that looks out for their interests

I don’t think you have the correct picture of what the US “accreditied investor” laws are about.

Anyone can invest in publicly-traded companies. The law prevents unaccredited (i.e. not rich) investors from investing in private companies.

A company has to go through a number of processes, such as disclosure and underwriting, when it goes public. These processes effectively make it a much safer investment vehicle, amenable to purchase by pretty much anyone. A company that hasn’t gone public hasn’t gone through these processes, and therefore might just be a huckster’s sham.

For a look at what it looks like when private companies are allowed to raise money from the public, don’t look at other countries (which have similar laws) or at Bitcoin (which nobody but rich people even understands.) Look at early Kickstarter, before they put in more stringent disclosure requirements; and look at Indiegogo, which still doesn’t have such requirements. Especially look at projects that started on Kickstarter, were kicked off for not meeting the disclosure requirements, and then went on to raise money on Indiegogo. You know what percentage of those are scams? It’s not small.

Early US stock market investment, before the requirements to IPO were made stringent, look a lot like Indiegogo. Anything and everything was up for investment, without examination. Many people did lose their livelihoods.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#64
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame the SEC for this one. Their accredited investor regulation gave the future to the rich. Seed round, series A, B, C, etc should be a vehicle for class mobility. Instead it's a way for the rich and powerful to accumulate more wealth. With YC and other incubators acting as a filter for where investors should put money, it matters more which zipcode you were born into than your overall intelligence and creativity.…

I definitely believe ICOs are the future of funding. We are at a premature stage, but as the ecosystem matures we'll see a lot of great things come out of it unless the SEC and whatnot decide to nuke it. For instance, until now ICOs have been able to raise money without a prototype in hand, this I believe will change.

I hope you are correct, coins are the right abstraction for shares. It requires talented people to take a risk.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#65
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC at one point Microsoft paid one of them to run Windows and years ago there was one running OS X. Decades ago during the Unix Wars there used to be proprietary HPC OSes.

When Cray and SGI were still in the game there was a lot more operating system diversity. Apple's Xserve cluster was an interesting experiment but it never really went anywhere.

> Apple's Xserve cluster was an interesting experiment but it never really went anywhere.

A pity Apple does not manufacture real servers any more. With the old cheesegrater-mac-pros, which were the last thing available after the Xserve death, you at least have the option to put in 4 disks and do a RAID setup, but no remote power/console management or a serial port...

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#66
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame the SEC for this one. Their accredited investor regulation gave the future to the rich. Seed round, series A, B, C, etc should be a vehicle for class mobility. Instead it's a way for the rich and powerful to accumulate more wealth. With YC and other incubators acting as a filter for where investors should put money, it matters more which zipcode you were born into than your overall intelligence and creativity.…

Investor accreditation makes sense (for now.) Giving poor people free access to untested-investment-vehicle-X is basically the same as giving them over-the-counter access to scheduled drugs. Mistakes will be made, and the people making them—lacking resources as they do—won't be able to recover from them. Right now, we're spending a lot of money trying to figure out how to get people out of these ruts. (Free housing s…

"Investor accreditation makes sense (for now.)"

No it doesn't. It's pure nanny statism. The government has no business telling people what they can and can't invest in or spend their money on. Yes startups are risky. So are lots of things. Why should the wealthy have no restrictions on them, but the poor do? This is literally "class warfare".

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#68
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame the SEC for this one. Their accredited investor regulation gave the future to the rich. Seed round, series A, B, C, etc should be a vehicle for class mobility. Instead it's a way for the rich and powerful to accumulate more wealth. With YC and other incubators acting as a filter for where investors should put money, it matters more which zipcode you were born into than your overall intelligence and creativity.…

Investor accreditation makes sense (for now.) Giving poor people free access to untested-investment-vehicle-X is basically the same as giving them over-the-counter access to scheduled drugs. Mistakes will be made, and the people making them—lacking resources as they do—won't be able to recover from them. Right now, we're spending a lot of money trying to figure out how to get people out of these ruts. (Free housing s…

[deleted]

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#69
post #4

A win for open source. I was just thinking the other day that it's a shame that Linus is not a billionaire. Seems he's doing just fine however: "Finnish-American software engineer and hacker Linus Torvalds has as estimated net worth of $150 million and an estimated annual salary of $10 million. He earned his net worth as the principal force behind the development of the Linux kernel." Source: https://www.therichest.c…

> it's a shame that Linus is not a billionaire

I mean $150m is a LOT of money. $10m/yr is a lot too. Just to put that into perspective, you could put that in a very safe ETF and make over $1m/yr. You could easily make $10m/yr just off interest.

That's A LOT of money. And a lot of people would be perfectly content with that, let alone know what to do with it. I mean if you can rent the entire country of Lichtenstein for over 12 years, I'm sure you're pretty comfortable. I don't think Torvalds is in it for the money. Measuring success by somebody's net worth is a really poor metric.

Re: All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

#70
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame the SEC for this one. Their accredited investor regulation gave the future to the rich. Seed round, series A, B, C, etc should be a vehicle for class mobility. Instead it's a way for the rich and powerful to accumulate more wealth. With YC and other incubators acting as a filter for where investors should put money, it matters more which zipcode you were born into than your overall intelligence and creativity.…

Investor accreditation makes sense (for now.) Giving poor people free access to untested-investment-vehicle-X is basically the same as giving them over-the-counter access to scheduled drugs. Mistakes will be made, and the people making them—lacking resources as they do—won't be able to recover from them. Right now, we're spending a lot of money trying to figure out how to get people out of these ruts. (Free housing s…

> basically the same as giving them over-the-counter access to scheduled drugs.

Something that also should be legal (with reasonable discrimination). I would choose a different metaphor because this one doesn't work in your favor.

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