Linux Still Owns Supercomputing

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
I knew that most of the world's supercomputers ran Linux but I had no idea it was this many. :eek:

Once more the best of the best supercomputer experts came together to decide which are the fastest of the fast computers. Number one with a bullet continues to be Tianhe-2, aka Milky Way-2, a Chinese supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology. Its operating system? Linux of course.
Click to expand...
 
Let's not forget about servers and embedded devices.

Linux dominates everywhere except for desktop.
 
Evil Penguin said:
Laugh all you want, guess what your phone/tablet likely runs.
Click to expand...

Windows. :p

Linux is powerful and can be very light. Windows Embedded can't touch it. Full Windows (or Windows Core) can't touch it. It's a very piecemeal system. If you only need a couple things, you can run those couple things. You can make it super lean and run on your specific hardware.

If I had a super computer, it wouldn't run Windows. And I love Windows.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Windows. :p

Linux is powerful and can be very light. Windows Embedded can't touch it. Full Windows (or Windows Core) can't touch it. It's a very piecemeal system. If you only need a couple things, you can run those couple things. You can make it super lean and run on your specific hardware.

If I had a super computer, it wouldn't run Windows. And I love Windows.
Click to expand...

Not even a matter of being "lean" or "effecient". I just couldn't imagine trying to manage all the processes and interactions using Windows.

Windows is fabulous when it comes to multimedia. Trying to manage data? Forget about it. Thats Linux.
 
crusty_juggler said:
If my phone runs Linux, then the Dreamcast in my closet runs Windows 98.

Android is not Linux.
Click to expand...

Android is based on the Linux kernel. It may be heavily modified by Google, but at heart Android is still a Linux distribution.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Windows. :p

Linux is powerful and can be very light. Windows Embedded can't touch it. Full Windows (or Windows Core) can't touch it. It's a very piecemeal system. If you only need a couple things, you can run those couple things. You can make it super lean and run on your specific hardware.

If I had a super computer, it wouldn't run Windows. And I love Windows.
Click to expand...

Plus Windows isn't too great at removing useless services. Linux is like building blocks, pick the ones you want to build with.
 
krogen said:
Do some research before posting. Android uses the Linux kernel. While it may not be Linux, as Linux is a kernel and Android is an OS (could be classified as a Linux distribution), it certainly runs on Linux.
Click to expand...

Truth is linux has become the 'secret sauce' of embedded tech. Most everything with a SoC of some kind is running a flavor of an embedded linux.

I remember a few years back I was doing some volunteer work for a church ministry working in a video control room. They just installed a new high end console that controlled everything. Everyone was ooohing and ahhing. All the people involved was -Apple or nothing- artsy media types. They were making some settings changes and had to reboot the console. Everyone watch as the thing booted and was saying "Wow, this this is their proprietary OS, for this system, high end stuff". I started laughing my ass off. I said "No it's not! That console runs linux. That is what you are looking at."
 
Sadly, Linux is super popular with everything that isn't associated with the mainstream Linux. I guess those 5000 distros and a million different UI options and programs really did a number on the mainstream
 
Trimlock said:
Plus Windows isn't too great at removing useless services.
Click to expand...

This is more a developer or application problem but I agree it is a huge problem with Windows and I can't stand it. As soon as you run or install an application it craps all over the registry, file system, start-ups services, and puts shortcuts everywhere. Uninstalling only removes like 80% of this and just leaves leaves the other 20% to slow everything down.
 
BryanSTG said:
This is more a developer or application problem but I agree it is a huge problem with Windows and I can't stand it. As soon as you run or install an application it craps all over the registry, file system, start-ups services, and puts shortcuts everywhere. Uninstalling only removes like 80% of this and just leaves leaves the other 20% to slow everything down.
Click to expand...

I'd much better at keeping track of install fires with win 8 and 2012, but yes they were terrible in this regard too. My main gripe was Windows originally requires a ton of services that can't be removed.
 
crusty_juggler said:
If my phone runs Linux, then the Dreamcast in my closet runs Windows 98.

Android is not Linux.
Click to expand...

Android is Droid/Linux.
You are thinking of GNU/Linux, or Linux in the classical sense.

Also, your Dreamcast can run Linux, as well as other UNIX and UNIX-like OSes such as NetBSD on the SuperH CPU architecture.
Sooo much fail in this thread.

PornoSatan said:
Sadly, Linux is super popular with everything that isn't associated with the mainstream Linux. I guess those 5000 distros and a million different UI options and programs really did a number on the mainstream
Click to expand...
At least that gives the users and developers options, unlike Windows.
The mainstream is focused on easy-to-use and mindless "computing" or operation.

Essentially, I doubt anyone knows what their apps are called, all they know is that the blue and red app is the Internet.
Mainstream is all about appealing to the masses, and while I applaud the engineering that went into making it as such, the users themselves leave me anything but envious of them.

Trimlock said:
Plus Windows isn't too great at removing useless services. Linux is like building blocks, pick the ones you want to build with.
Click to expand...
Windows is far more automated and "user friendly", but because of this, is a lot more rigid, primarily for compatibility.
With Linux, and other *NIX OSes, the user is really only limited by what they know; you are right, it is exactly like building blocks.

With Windows, you always get a 1 to 2-story house.
With Linux, you can build anything from a mud hut to a sky scraper.

With OS X, you get a coffee shop and/or book store. :p
 
485141.jpg
 
The "Linux" that runs the Chinese Supercomputer is not for sale...anywhere...;) The Linux that that runs on your phablet is not remotely the same, either--just as the many versions of Linux that IBM sells & Redhat sells and gosh knows who else sells--aren't the "Linux" that you think you know about...;)

With computers there's pretty much just one Windows, but there are 70/11 different--mostly incompatible--versions of "Linux" deployed all over the world. It's one good reason "Linux" will never own the desktop; not even close--because there is no "Linux" in the sense that there's Windows. Doesn't exist.
 
Yeah i'm still waiting for a DESKTOP linux distro to actually be popular, everyone already know embedded solutions linux is very popular because it's a dedicated device and linux kernel doesn't cost a company extra.
 
WaltC said:
The "Linux" that runs the Chinese Supercomputer is not for sale...anywhere...;)
Click to expand...

Neither is the Linux that runs on the phablet that you're referring to...

The Linux that that runs on your phablet is not remotely the same, either--just as the many versions of Linux that IBM sells & Redhat sells and gosh knows who else sells--aren't the "Linux" that you think you know about...;)
Click to expand...

Nobody sells Linux as it's free and open source. People pay RedHat for support and non-free software.

Also, just because it supports different hardware... It's not remotely the same? It might or might not be compiled for the same architecture, but the same thing can be said about Windows. Phablet performance tweaks might or might not exist, either way, calling it "not remotely the same" is an over exaggeration.

With computers there's pretty much just one Windows, but there are 70/11 different--mostly incompatible--versions of "Linux" deployed all over the world. It's one good reason "Linux" will never own the desktop; not even close--because there is no "Linux" in the sense that there's Windows. Doesn't exist.
Click to expand...

Most distributions have kernels that load appropriate modules during the boot process. They are very much compatible across a lot of hardware.

Linux is not some magical entity that doesn't have a central location. There's https://kernel.org/ and there is a stable Linux branch, and everything is based off of it.
 
krogen said:
Also, just because it supports different hardware... It's not remotely the same? It might or might not be compiled for the same architecture, but the same thing can be said about Windows. Phablet performance tweaks might or might not exist, either way, calling it "not remotely the same" is an over exaggeration.
Click to expand...

Having a common kernel is an entirely different thing than binary compatibility otherwise Android apps would be able to run on desktop Linux distros natively. I'm not knocking Linux because of this, you can't run a Windows Phone app on Windows x86/RT natively, though with Windows 10 it sounds like that will be pretty close to how it could work.

Linux and Windows don't generally refer to the same type of entity. When talking about Windows, it's normally in reference to one of the various desktop or server versions with high degrees of binary compatibility among them. Linux is often referred to at a much lower level, like the kernel where binary compatibility is non-existent, such as is the case between Android and a desktop Linux distro. And my guess is that these supercomputer versions aren't binary compatible with Android or Ubuntu.
 
^ If the supercomputers are x86_64, then they would be binary compatible with Ubuntu, but most likely not Android (Droid/Linux) as that requires the ARM architecture.
Now if the supercomputers are POWER, PowerPC AS, SPARC, or something else, then definitely, the won't be binary compatible with either OS... unless of course you are running a version of Ubuntu compiled for said architectures, which do indeed exist. ;)
 
Red Falcon said:
^ If the supercomputers are x86_64, then they would be binary compatible with Ubuntu, but most likely not Android (Droid/Linux) as that requires the ARM architecture.
Now if the supercomputers are POWER, PowerPC AS, SPARC, or something else, then definitely, the won't be binary compatible with either OS... unless of course you are running a version of Ubuntu compiled for said architectures, which do indeed exist. ;)
Click to expand...

Binary compatibility is more than just being on the same compute architecture, it also requires compatible APIs and system architecture. Android runs on x86 but still Android apps don't run natively on desktop Linux distros as the APIs and architecture are different.
 
heatlesssun said:
Binary compatibility is more than just being on the same compute architecture, it also requires compatible APIs and system architecture. Android runs on x86 but still Android apps don't run natively on desktop Linux distros as the APIs and architecture are different.
Click to expand...

This is Linux we are talking about.
No, natively, out-of-the-box, they probably won't work.

But that doesn't mean we can't make them work.
This is Linux we are talking about, not Windows or UNIX, and even then, technically, it could be possible with UNIX, just a hell of a lot harder.
 
heatlesssun said:
Binary compatibility is more than just being on the same compute architecture, it also requires compatible APIs and system architecture. Android runs on x86 but still Android apps don't run natively on desktop Linux distros as the APIs and architecture are different.
Click to expand...

You'd have to make sure Linux supported spying on everything the user is doing if you wanted to run Android apps. I dunno why you'd even want to though since there are lots and lots of perfectly good programs that already work for Linux without Google's creeperware stuff built in.
 
Red Falcon said:
This is Linux we are talking about.
No, natively, out-of-the-box, they probably won't work.

But that doesn't mean we can't make them work.
This is Linux we are talking about, not Windows or UNIX, and even then, technically, it could be possible with UNIX, just a hell of a lot harder.
Click to expand...

I can run Android apps on my Surface Pro 3 with full touch support with an emulator in Windows faster than most Android devices can them natively, so that's not really saying much.
 
Makes me smile honestly. Sure consumer is all GUI driven, but when it comes down to it *real* computing is still done at the CLI.
 
Yeah i'm still waiting for a DESKTOP linux distro to actually be popular
Click to expand...

linuxmint was pretty popular a few years back.

i've still got a linuxmint 6 (felicia) livecd that i keep around for emergencies.
 
Predaking said:
But can it run Battlefield 4?
Click to expand...

With PlayOnLinux and WINE, quite possibly.
Just to add, WINE is not emulation, and the overhead was less than 1% on my old AMD 5000+ X2 from 2006.


heatlesssun said:
I can run Android apps on my Surface Pro 3 with full touch support with an emulator in Windows faster than most Android devices can them natively, so that's not really saying much.
Click to expand...
That's emulation though, and while x86 might be able to handle weak-ass ARM CPUs easily, it won't be doing the same with POWER/PowerPC, SPARC, and many other supercomputing CPU architectures.
Perhaps it can emulate them, but it will be at a tiny fraction of what will be happening natively.

I mean, Linux can do this, too.
It's not a knock against Windows, I'm glad it can do it.

But emulation will only go so far on any platform.
This is why today's top x86_64 CPUs can't emulate a Xenon tri-core PowerPC CPU from the XBox360 (circa 2005/6) properly, save for a select few games.

Well, it can, but again, at a tiny fraction of the performance.
 
Red Falcon said:
That's emulation though, and while x86 might be able to handle weak-ass ARM CPUs easily, it won't be doing the same with POWER/PowerPC, SPARC, and many other supercomputing CPU architectures.
Perhaps it can emulate them, but it will be at a tiny fraction of what will be happening natively.

I mean, Linux can do this, too.
It's not a knock against Windows, I'm glad it can do it.

But emulation will only go so far on any platform.
This is why today's top x86_64 CPUs can't emulate a Xenon tri-core PowerPC CPU from the XBox360 (circa 2005/6) properly, save for a select few games.

Well, it can, but again, at a tiny fraction of the performance.
Click to expand...

I agree with what you're saying but my point is that you can't run Android apps natively on desktop Linux and you an emulator like you do with Windows. Sure, you could add the APIs to support Android app natively but Windows could do that to. Or OS X or fill in the blank.

Linux is great for supercomputers and servers and embedded devices because it's free and you have the source code to build out a distro as needed. Obviously Windows doesn't provide that kind of flexibility. But there's nothing about a Linux distro that ensures or enforces binary compatibility. So yes, there's lots of things that can be called Linux, but that doesn't imply compatibility or interoperability. That's kind of part of the freedom in Linux actually. Nothing you do has to actually work with anything else that's Linux based.
 
^ Exactly, it gives the users options to build what they want.
It definitely isn't designed for mainstream (GNU/Linux), but that's what everything else is for.
 
WaltC said:
The "Linux" that runs the Chinese Supercomputer is not for sale...anywhere...;) The Linux that that runs on your phablet is not remotely the same, either--just as the many versions of Linux that IBM sells & Redhat sells and gosh knows who else sells--aren't the "Linux" that you think you know about...;)

With computers there's pretty much just one Windows, but there are 70/11 different--mostly incompatible--versions of "Linux" deployed all over the world. It's one good reason "Linux" will never own the desktop; not even close--because there is no "Linux" in the sense that there's Windows. Doesn't exist.
Click to expand...

Talking bollox much
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top