Re: Supercomputer OS's


"Iwo Mergler" <Iwo.Mergler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:f09ha4-07t.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
joseph2k wrote:

For the entire top 500 they are running a Unix variant or a linux variant.
Linux "owns" the list with Unix claiming just 92 out of the 500 machines,
Mac OS X on three of them and not a single one running any M$ OS. This
includes Japan's earth simulator, a vector machine (now ranked 14). IBM
and HP are the top hardware vendors. Some interesting surprises for me.

http://www.top500.org/stats/28/os/



This is not as surprising as it sounds.

There are thousands of people worldwide capable of
porting Linux to a new architecture, and the source
code is readily available. For a new processor
or new computer architecture, Linux is the obvious
first choice.

You pick an already supported architecture similar
to your own and make a few modifications. It's a few
tens to a few hundred lines of code.

Err ...a tad optimistic that!

In my very recent experience a Linux port to a slightly different environment is
about 8 people's time for a year and thousands of line of code - mostly test
cases though, but also new drivers and customising things in "sysfs" and /etc/.
Boot scripts take a good deal of effort to get right too. Thousands of emails
also to the kernel list because one, "surprise" will find stuff when testing
that has been there for years and does not work because nobody used it - except
the customer that wanted the port!

The customer did not port the core application: They build a Virtual Machine to
run the old application on the Linux we provided. The old app is millions of
lines of crufty Erlang code that has been running since 1970! Nobody will change
that just for the sake of some fashion in OS's!!


As we speak, Linux already supports about 50 different
processor families, with hundreds of different
implementations.

Can you imagine the amount of money required to get
MS to port one of their OS'es to a computer of which
less than 10 will be sold?

... Or the development Tools.


Regards,

Iwo



.

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