Comments on: Linux still dominates the HPC arena http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/enterprise-linux/linux-still-dominates-the-hpc-arena/ A SearchEnterpriseLinux.com blog Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:53:05 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: clusteradmin.blogspot.com http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/enterprise-linux/linux-still-dominates-the-hpc-arena/#comment-1035 clusteradmin.blogspot.com Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:15:17 +0000 http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/enterprise-linux/linux-still-dominates-the-hpc-arena/#comment-1035 I think one of the reasons for Linux being dominant in HPC is the rapid progress of the commodity hardware technologies that Linux supports. New CPUs and chipsets are more and more powerful and they get Linux support right out of the box (thanks to the expanding Linux community and industry). On the other hand, small HPC vendors like SGI or Cray are not able to keep up with manufacturing all the parts themselves and yet keeping up with the OS development (look what happened to IRIX). So they are forced to choose the best components from the market (look how SGI switched from MIPS to Itanium and then Xeon), perhaps add some in-house developed hardware (e.g. NUMAlink), roll in some kernel patches and modules and off they go. Interested in building and administering clusters? Please visit my blog at: http://clusteradmin.blogspot.com/ I think one of the reasons for Linux being dominant in HPC is the rapid progress of the commodity hardware technologies that Linux supports.
New CPUs and chipsets are more and more powerful and they get Linux support right out of the box (thanks to the expanding Linux community and industry).

On the other hand, small HPC vendors like SGI or Cray are not able to keep up with manufacturing all the parts themselves and yet keeping up with the OS development (look what happened to IRIX).
So they are forced to choose the best components from the market (look how SGI switched from MIPS to Itanium and then Xeon), perhaps add some in-house developed hardware (e.g. NUMAlink), roll in some kernel patches and modules and off they go.

Interested in building and administering clusters? Please visit my blog at: <a href="http://clusteradmin.blogspot.com/" title="http://clusteradmin.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://clusteradmin.blogspot.com/</a>

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