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

zdnet.com

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

#171

Post by bantunes »

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #159
zanny wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its so much a shame that Linus isn't a billionaire than it is we have billionaires at all. There is limited rational or ethical reason for one human being to accumulate so much centralized wealth. There is being rewarded for hard work / skill / innovation and there is exploiting people to become rich, and the line between those is very hard to distinguish when talking about individuals making more than…

There is no problem in having billionaires, there is no problem in an income gap. If we are all billioniares, fine. If the lowest income can buy everything they want, fine. The problem is that billionaires buy politicians, people are too poor to live in western countries despite working, sometimes two jobs, and people with income from work pay for social security and income taxes while billionaires with income from c…

> There is no problem in having billionaires

> The problem is that billionaires buy politicians

Is your solution somehow forcing billionaires to not do what their wealth allows them to? If they can, they will. That's why having billionaires is a problem.

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

#172

Post by bantunes »

wmf wrote: post #10

Note that BlueGene/Q is commonly reported to run "Linux" but 99% of the nodes are running CNK instead. https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/bgq/#Software

> This is an open source, Linux-like, light-weight, 64-bit operating system that runs on the compute nodes

Seems to be a Linux kernel fork with performance optimizations.

EDIT: I stand corrected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNK_operating_system

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

#173

Post by oldsklgdfth »

nhaehnle wrote: post #155
JoshTriplett wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is limited rational or ethical reason for one human being to accumulate so much centralized wealth First: yes, there are ethical reasons to accumulate so many resources : because some problems are incredibly hard to solve and need a lot of resources to even start to solve. Second, it is not on the people who have earned something to prove why they should be "permitted" to keep it; it's on the people who belie…

> Second, it is not on the people who have earned something to prove why they should be "permitted" to keep it; it's on the people who believe it should be taken away from them to justify that. This is a great example of status quo bias. You believe that the onus of arguing ethics is on the people who want to change the status quo when really, we should start by thinking about what society ought to look like from fir…

> And then you absolutely do have to give arguments for why you want any inequality to exist in the first place

I'm not in favor of inequality, but I can't disregard the fact that it is naturally occuring in most realms. From geography, to agriculture, to education, to skill, etc. If there is one principle that I think is true is that in nature there is a complete lack of equality, yet there is balance.

I understand that equality is an ideal that we aspire toward. But it almost seems arbitrary and forced when you consider that systems don't inheritely have equality built into them.

Sorry if this doesn't make sense, just trying to spark conversation.

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

#174

Post by JoshTriplett »

ramblerman wrote: post #169
JoshTriplett wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is limited rational or ethical reason for one human being to accumulate so much centralized wealth First: yes, there are ethical reasons to accumulate so many resources : because some problems are incredibly hard to solve and need a lot of resources to even start to solve. Second, it is not on the people who have earned something to prove why they should be "permitted" to keep it; it's on the people who belie…

> It's a shame that there exist people with nothing. The former doesn't need fixing; the latter absolutely does. I'm not sure if you are being facetious or you generally don't see the link here.

There's a massive difference between "we should tax people slightly more" and "nobody should have more than X amount".

(Leaving aside that we already have the money to help people who have nothing and are just really terrible about actually doing it for all sorts of reasons that would not be solved by having more taxes.)

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

#175

Post by oldsklgdfth »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #132
tammer wrote: post #121

With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline. Brutal to be confronted with such a cutting opinion in an otherwise congenial article and to have no thoughts of disagreement.

America is a bet that chaos has some advantages over good governance.

Is good governance obtainable in a country of such scale and idological diversity?

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

#176

Post by sergiosgc »

nhaehnle wrote: post #155
JoshTriplett wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is limited rational or ethical reason for one human being to accumulate so much centralized wealth First: yes, there are ethical reasons to accumulate so many resources : because some problems are incredibly hard to solve and need a lot of resources to even start to solve. Second, it is not on the people who have earned something to prove why they should be "permitted" to keep it; it's on the people who belie…

> Second, it is not on the people who have earned something to prove why they should be "permitted" to keep it; it's on the people who believe it should be taken away from them to justify that. This is a great example of status quo bias. You believe that the onus of arguing ethics is on the people who want to change the status quo when really, we should start by thinking about what society ought to look like from fir…

> You believe that the onus of arguing ethics is on the people who want to change the status quo when really, we should start by thinking about what society ought to look like from first principles. And then you absolutely do have to give arguments for why you want any inequality to exist in the first place, let alone billionaires.[0]

Interesting challenge, taking a look at the need for inequality based on first principles. Let me attempt my hand at it.

If you look at a capitalist economy as an optimization mechanism, large wealth concentrations are sources for large jumps in the solution space that escape local maximums. Explaining why:

Start by ignoring the comfort providing aspect of wealth. At these levels, wealth is more about power to shape society than it is about personal comfort. On the personal comfort scale, you get diminishing returns as you spend more.

In terms of shaping society, a billionaire has more power than a millionaire. Whereas, for a large project, a millionaire must convince other millionaires to share the risk, a billionaire may throw himself on a tangent all on his own.

This single-mind behaviour, when compared to group-mind behaviour, produces solutions that are a lot different from the status quo. In terms of optimization, they are larger jumps in the coordinate space.

Now, these large jumps in the solution coordinate space may be beneficial, may be dangerous, or altogether innocuous. Most are innocuous, some are wildly positive (Tesla pushing the auto market to move towards electric traction), some are wildly negative (Koch brothers capturing government).

The question of whether the final balance is positive or negative is an extremely difficult question. We're talking about very rare events in the optimization of very complex systems.

So, I have a very nice, useless theory :-)

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

#177

Post by ekianjo »

jumpman500 wrote: post #77
ekianjo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is we have billionaires at all. This line of thinking always makes me laugh. You don't complain when a doctors makes money by serving hundreds of patients every month right? Then, when someone builds a product/service that is used by hundreds of millions, or billions of people, the natural conclusion is that they will become millionaires and billionaires. It's very natural, and very logical. > we are talking abo…

> It's very natural, and very logical. Being natural and logical doesn't make it moral or ethical. I think you're only kidding yourself if you believe that people deserve that much money and power. > How about folks who centralize powers like politicians in high level functions, who have not even been elected but appointed? How do you feel about that? They also can have massive influence on the world's affairs, even…

> I think you're only kidding yourself if you believe that people deserve that much money and power.

And who is it to decide? What organization? Money is simply a proxy for utility in society (at least for salaries) based on demand and offer. Do you want to replace that by divine birth rights? Casts? Or cancel private property altogether? So far that's the "less worse" system we have found that does not make people live in abject poverty. And you know what, it's working. Look at WHO poverty reports: poverty is decreasing progressively around the world.

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

#178

Post by ekianjo »

yequalsx wrote: post #87
ekianjo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is we have billionaires at all. This line of thinking always makes me laugh. You don't complain when a doctors makes money by serving hundreds of patients every month right? Then, when someone builds a product/service that is used by hundreds of millions, or billions of people, the natural conclusion is that they will become millionaires and billionaires. It's very natural, and very logical. > we are talking abo…

Would you be OK if one person controlled 99% of the world's wealth? If so then what percent of the world's wealth concentrated in one person would make you uncomfortable? Why this percentage and not a lower one? As it stands now there is a huge disparity in the distribution of wealth. Shouldn't there be a cap on how much one person can have and floor on how little a person can have? I think so. My wife is a doctor in…

> Shouldn't there be a cap on how much one person can have and floor on how little a person can have? I think so.

Why fix a cap? As long as you have a free market, people will compete and the fortunes of yesterday does not mean the fortunes will be there tomorrow. Plus, people die, so whoever was powerful 50 years ago is progressively replaced by the normal order of things, their wealth heavily taxed and split among their descendants.

> Would you be OK if one person controlled 99% of the world's wealth?

It would be great to stop drawing caricatures in order to have serious discussions. Otherwise anyone can make grossly inaccurate assumptions and reach extremely nonsensical conclusions anytime.

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

#179

Post by yequalsx »

ekianjo wrote: post #178
yequalsx wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be OK if one person controlled 99% of the world's wealth? If so then what percent of the world's wealth concentrated in one person would make you uncomfortable? Why this percentage and not a lower one? As it stands now there is a huge disparity in the distribution of wealth. Shouldn't there be a cap on how much one person can have and floor on how little a person can have? I think so. My wife is a doctor in…

> Shouldn't there be a cap on how much one person can have and floor on how little a person can have? I think so. Why fix a cap? As long as you have a free market, people will compete and the fortunes of yesterday does not mean the fortunes will be there tomorrow. Plus, people die, so whoever was powerful 50 years ago is progressively replaced by the normal order of things, their wealth heavily taxed and split among…

I wasn't drawing a caricature. I asked a question about wealth concentration. How about answering it? Is there a level of wealth concentration that is immoral or unfair? I believe so. I think it is the case that 500 people control more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion. That seems absurd to me. The free market is not a great mechanism for controlling such an outcome given that we are in a situation of extreme wealth inequality. The distribution of wealth in the world is grossly unfair. And yes I'm in the part where my wealth is grossly unfair in comparison to the bottom 50%.

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

#180

Post by vram22 »

skrebbel wrote: post #49
vram22 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, that site says his background is actually Swedish(-speaking, at least). >Born Linus Benedict Torvalds on December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland, Torvalds is the son of journalists Ana and Nils Torvalds who belong to the Swedish-speaking minority.

Big difference between Swedish and -speaking. Swedish speaking Finns typically identify as just that: Finns who happen to speak Swedish. It's a bit like calling someone from Quebec "French".

Didn't know it, thanks. Agree with the Quebec thing.
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