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Referring to this BBC Article: Supercomputing superpowers

Almost all the supercomputers are using Linux as operating system. Why is Linux so popular?

Chris S
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    I think this is a valid/real question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_systems_used_on_top_500_supercomputers.svg – Unreason Jun 01 '10 at 09:29

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Scalability, for one. Also, the fact that it is open source is important, since super computers exist almost solely for research and researchers love the flexibility of open-source software. They can hack and slash the OS to be ultra-tuned to fit their very specific need at the small cost of the source code and some bandwidth for anyone that's curious about what they did.

MDMarra
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  • +1, the ability to "hack and slash the OS" is 99% of it. The cost is most of the other 1%. – Chris S Jun 01 '10 at 02:25
  • I think cost plays a much bigger factor. It's no coincidence that most of the top players in the above link are free. Hardware compatibility plays a big part too, and Linux has arguably the best. – churnd Jun 01 '10 at 02:39
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    @churnd - For someone spending millions on a supercomputer, AIX or Windows licenses are not an issue. – MDMarra Jun 01 '10 at 03:00
  • @churnd, Windows HPC server is about $100/server for a larger cluster. That's a very minor cost compared to the hardware and custom software. – Chris S Jun 01 '10 at 03:06
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    @churnd, @Chris S, http://www.microsoft.com/hpc/en/us/how-to-buy/volume-licensing.aspx list it at $475/node. Cray XT5 (Jaguar) has ~25,000 computing nodes. Assuming your price ($100/node) this would bring the OS licence to 2.5M USD. Please do correct me if I am wrong in calculating the license. – Unreason Jun 01 '10 at 09:42