A natural progression
Doghouse – Real Beowulf
The prohibitive expense of early proprietary supercomputers is just part of why Linux has taken (and kept) the lead in this area.
There's been a lot of discussion recently in social media about high-performance computing (HPC) and the viability of Linux (instead of other operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD) for HPC. I thought I would use this month's column to explain why all 500 of the fastest computers in the world run GNU/Linux.
Around 1995, the supercomputer market was having some issues. Specially designed supercomputers were very expensive, mostly because companies (e.g., Cray, HP Enterprise El Capitan, CDC 6600) would each spend millions of dollars on specialized hardware design, their own proprietary OS, and perhaps their own compilers (etc., etc.) to make their own supercomputers – and then sell a relatively small number of them. These companies were going out of business.
Then two people at NASA, Dr. Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker took the concept of decomposing large problems into many smaller ones and using commodity hardware (desktop PCs and Ethernet networking) to make something they called Beowulf systems.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.
-
EU Sovereign Tech Fund Gains Traction
OpenForum Europe recently released a report regarding a sovereign tech fund with backing from several significant entities.
-
FreeBSD Promises a Full Desktop Installer
FreeBSD has lacked an option to include a full desktop environment during installation.
-
Linux Hits an Important Milestone
If you pay attention to the news in the Linux-sphere, you've probably heard that the open source operating system recently crashed through a ceiling no one thought possible.
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.