As of 2018, five hundred of the world's highest-performing systems run on Linux. We discuss the reasons for this situation and present the opinions of experts.
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Market condition
So far, Linux is losing out to other operating systems in the fight for the PC market. By Statista, Linux is installed on only 1,65% of computers, while 77% of users work with Microsoft's OS.
Things are better in the cloud and IaaS environment, although Windows remains the leader here. For example, this OS 45% of 1cloud.ru customers, while 44% preferred Linux distributions.
But if we talk about high-performance computing, then Linux is the clear leader here. According to a recent portal Top500 is a project that ranks the most powerful computing installations in the world - supercomputers from the top 500 list are built on Linux.
On the Summit machine (number one on the list at the time of writing), which was designed by IBM, . The same system the second most powerful supercomputer is Sierra, and the Chinese installation TaihuLight on Sunway Raise OS based on Linux.
Reasons for the prevalence of Linux
Performance. The Linux kernel is monolithic and in itself all the necessary components - drivers, task scheduler, file system. At the same time, kernel services are executed in the kernel address space, which improves overall performance. Linux also has relatively universal hardware requirements. Some distributions on devices with 128 MB of memory. The fact that Linux machines are more productive than Windows machines a few years ago even one of the Microsoft developers. Among the reasons, he singled out incremental updates aimed at optimizing the code base.
Openness. Supercomputers of the 70s and 80s of the last century were mostly built on commercial distributions based on UNIX, for example by Cray. Universities and research laboratories were forced to pay large royalties to OS authors, which negatively affected the final cost of high-performance computers - it amounted to millions of dollars. The emergence of an open operating system has significantly reduced software costs. In 1998 the first supercomputer based on Linux - Avalon Cluster. It was assembled at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA for only 152 thousand dollars.
The machine had a performance of 19,3 gigaflops and took 314th place in the world top. At first glance, this is a small achievement, but the price / performance ratio has attracted developers of supercomputers. In just two years, Linux managed to capture 10% of the market.
Customization. Each supercomputer has a unique IT infrastructure. The openness of Linux gives engineers the level of flexibility they need to make changes and optimize performance. Administrator Eddie Epstein, who helped design the Watson supercomputer, availability and relative ease of management is the main reason for choosing SUSE Linux.
Supercomputers of the near future
IBM's 148 petaflops Summit Computing System has been around for several years the first line of the Top500. But in 2021, the situation may change - several exascale supercomputers will enter the market at once.
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One of them is being developed by the US Department of Energy (DOE) together with specialists from Cray. Its power to the study of space and the consequences of global warming, the search for drugs for the treatment of cancer and for solar panels. It is already known that the supercomputer Cray Linux Environment OS − It is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise.
China will also present its exascale high-performance machine. It will be called Tianhe-3 and will find application in genetic engineering and drug development. The supercomputer will have to install Kylin Linux, which is already used for its predecessor - .
Thus, we can expect that in the next few years the status quo will continue, and Linux will continue to strengthen its leadership in the niche of the most powerful supercomputers.
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Source: habr.com