• Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    Maybe windows is not used in supercomputers often because unix and linux is more flexiable for the cpus they use(Power9,Sparc,etc)

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
      0·
      6 days ago

      That’s certainly a big part of it. When one needs to buy a metric crap load of CPUs, one tends to shop outside the popular defaults.

      Another big reason, historically, is that Supercomputers didn’t typically have any kind of non-command-line way to interact with them, and Windows needed it.

      Until PowerShell and Windows 8, there were still substantial configuration options in Windows that were 100% managed by graphical packages. They could be changed by direct file edits and registry editing, but it added a lot of risk. All of the “did I make a mistake” tools were graphical and so unavailable from command line.

      So any version of Windows stripped down enough to run on any super-computer cluster was going to be missing a lot of features, until around 2006.

      Since Linux and Unix started as command line operating systems, both already had plenty fully featured options for Supercomputing.

    • Matt@lemmy.ml
      0·
      7 days ago

      Plus Linux doesn’t limit you in the number of drives, whereas Windows limits you from A to Z.

      • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
        0·
        7 days ago

        For people who haven’t installed Windows before, the default boot drive is G, and the default file system is C

        So you only have 25 to work with (everything but G)

      • Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz
        0·
        7 days ago

        You can mount drives against folders in windows. So while D: is one drive, D:\Logs or D:\Cake can each be a different disk.

  • Rogue@feddit.uk
    0·
    8 days ago

    Any idea how it’d look if broken down into distros? I’m assuming enterprise support would be favoured so Red Hat or Ubuntu would dominate?

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
      0·
      8 days ago

      I can’t imagine Supercomputers to use a mainstream operating system such as Ubuntu. But clearly people even put Windows on it, so I shouldn’t be surprised…

      • superkret@feddit.orgOP
        0·
        8 days ago

        They do use Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE mostly.
        But for customers like that, the companies are of course willing to adjust the distro to their needs, with full support.
        Microsoft uses their own Linux distro now.

    • superkret@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      8 days ago

      The previously fastest ran on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the current fastest runs on SUSE Enterprise Linux.
      The current third fastest (owned by Microsoft) runs Ubuntu. That’s as far as I care to research.

    • superkret@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      7 days ago

      Unix is basically a brand name.
      BSD had to be completely re-written to remove all Unix code, so it could be published under a free license.
      It isn’t Unix certified.

      So it is Unix-derived, but not currently a Unix system (which is a completely meaningless term anyway).

        • dustyData@lemmy.world
          0·
          7 days ago

          It means nothing, it’s just a paycheck you sign and then you get to say “I certify my OS is Unix”. The little bit more technical part is POSIX compliance but modern OSs are such massive and complex beasts today that those compliances are tiny parts and very slowly but very surely becoming irrelevant over time.

          Apple made OSX Unix certified because it was cheap and it got them off the hook from a lawsuit. That’s it.

          • dan@upvote.au
            0·
            7 days ago

            Microsoft could technically get Windows certified as UNIX.

            I don’t think they could now that the POSIX subsystem and Windows Services for UNIX are both gone. Don’t you need at least some level of POSIX compliance (at least the parts where POSIX and Unix standards overlap) to get Unix certified?

    • dev_null@lemmy.ml
      0·
      8 days ago

      To make it more specific I guess, what’s the problem with that? It’s like having a “people living on boats” and “people with no long term address”. You could include the former in the latter, but then you are just conveying less information.

    • Spezi@feddit.org
      0·
      7 days ago

      Those were the basic entry level configurations needed to run Windows Vista with Aero effects.

      • Psythik@lemmy.world
        0·
        7 days ago

        Meh, you just needed a discrete GPU, and not even a good one either. Just a basic, bare-bones card with 128MB of VRAM and pixel shader 2.0 support would have sufficed, but sadly most users didn’t even have that back in 06-08.

        It was mostly the consumer’s fault for buying cheap garbage laptops with trash-tier iGPUs in them, and the manufacturer’s for slapping a “compatible with Vista” sticker on them and pushing those shitboxes on consumers. If you had a half-decent $700-800 PC then, Vista ran like a dream.

        • porl@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          7 days ago

          No, it was mostly the manufacturers fault for implying that their machine would run the operating system it shipped with well. Well that and Microsoft’s fault for strong arming them to push Vista on machines that weren’t going to run it well.

          • Psythik@lemmy.world
            0·
            6 days ago

            APUs obviously weren’t a thing yet, and it was common knowledge back then that contemporary iGPUs were complete and utter trash. I mean they were so weak that you couldn’t even play HD video or even enable some of XP’s very basic graphical effects with most integrated graphics.

            Everyone knew that you needed a dedicated graphics card back then, so you can and should in fact put some blame on the consumer for being dumb enough to buy a PC without one, regardless of what the sticker said. I mean I was a teenager back then and even still I knew better. The blame goes both ways.

            • porl@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              6 days ago

              No, if you weren’t “involved in the scene” and only had the word of the person at the store then you have no idea what an iGPU is, let alone why they weren’t up to the task of running the very thing it was sold with.

              You were a teenager in a time where teenagers average tech knowledge was much higher than before. That is not the same as someone who just learnt they now need one of those computer things for work. Not everyone had someone near them who could explain it to them. Blaming them for not knowing the intricacies of the machines is ridiculous. It was pure greed by Microsoft and the manufacturers.

        • olympicyes@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          7 days ago

          Most computers sold are the lowest end models. At work we never got anything decent so it was always a bit of a struggle. Our office stayed with XP for way longer than we should have so we skipped Vista altogether and adopted Windows 7 a few years late.

    • A7thStone@lemmy.world
      0·
      8 days ago

      Yes, in the linux stat. The otheros option on the early PS3 allowed you to boot linux, which is what most, of not all, of the clusters used.

    • superkret@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      8 days ago

      I think you can actually see it in the graph.
      The Condor Cluster with its 500 Teraflops would have been in the Top 500 supercomputers from 2009 till ~2014.
      The PS3 operating system is a BSD, and you can see a thin yellow line in that exact time frame.

  • Z3k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    8 days ago

    As someone who worked on designing racks in the super computer space about 10 q5vyrs ago I had no clue windows and mac even tried to entered the space

      • Z3k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        Yeh it was system x I worked on out default was redhat. I forget the other options but win and mac sure as shut wasn’t on the list

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
          0·
          8 days ago

          but it did not stick.

          Yeah. It was bad. The job of a Supercomputer is to be really fast and really parallel. Windows for Supercomputing was… not.

          I honestly thought it might make it, considering the engineering talent that Microsoft had.

          But I think time proves that Unix and Linux just had an insurmountable head start. Windows, to the best of my knowledge, never came close to closing the gap.

          • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
            0·
            8 days ago

            But, surely Windows is the wrong OS?

            Windows is a per-user GUI… supercomputing is all about crunching numbers, isn’t it?

            I can understand M$ trying to get into this market and I know Windows server can be used to run stuff, but again, you don’t need a GUI on each node a supercomputer they’d be better off with DOS…?

            • Badabinski@kbin.earth
              0·
              8 days ago

              I could see the NT kernel being okay in isolation, but the rest of Windows coming along for the ride puts the kibosh on that idea.

            • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
              0·
              8 days ago

              But, surely Windows is the wrong OS?

              Oh yes! To be clear - trying to put any version of Windows on a super-computer is every bit as insane as you might imagine. By what I heard in the rumor mill, it went every bit as badly as anyone might have guessed.

              But I like to root for an underdog, and it was neat to hear about Microsoft engineers trying to take the Windows kernel somewhere it had no rational excuse to run, perhaps by sheer force of will and hard work.

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
            0·
            8 days ago

            At this point I think it’s most telling that even Azure runs on Linux. Microsoft’s twin flagship products somehow still only work well when Linux does the heavy lifting and works as the glue between

            • sep@lemmy.world
              0·
              8 days ago

              Where did you find that azure runs on linux? I have been qurious for a while, but google refuse to tell me anything but the old “a variant of hyper-v” or “linux is 60% of the azure worklad” (not what i asked about!)

              • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
                0·
                6 days ago

                Where did you find that azure runs on linux?

                I dont know of anywhere that Microsoft confirms, officially, that Azure, itself, is largely running on Linux. They share stats about what workloads others are running on it, but not, to my knowledge, about what it is composed of.

                I suppose that would be an oversimplification, anyway.

                But that Azure itself is running mostly on Linux is an open secret among folks who spend time chatting with engineers who have worked on the framework of the Azure cloud.

                When I have chatted with them, Azure cloud engineers have displayed huge amouts of Linux experience while they sometimes needed to “phone a friend” to answer Windows server edition questions.

                For a variety of reasons related to how much longer people have been scaling Linux clusters, than Windows servers, this isn’t particularly shocking.

                Edit: To confirm what others have mentioned, inferring from chatting with MS staff suggests, more specifically, that Azure, itself, is mostly Linux OS running on a Hyper-V virtualization later.

              • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
                0·
                7 days ago

                Good question! I can’t remember.

                I think I read a Microsoft blog or something like a decade ago that said they shifted from a Hyper-V based solution to Linux to improve stability, but honestly it’s been so long I wouldn’t be shocked if I just saw it in a reddit comment on a related article that I didn’t yet have the technical knowhow to fully comprehend and took it as gospel.

    • gerdesj@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      8 days ago

      about 10 q5vyrs ago

      Have you been distracted and typed a password/PSK in the wrong field 8)

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 days ago

    Wow, that’s kind of a lot more Linux than I was expecting, but it also makes sense. Pretty cool tbh.

  • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
    0·
    8 days ago

    This looks impressive for Linux, and I’m glad FLOSS has such an impact! However, I wonder if the numbers are still this good if you consider more supercomputers. Maybe not. Or maybe yes! We’d have to see the evidence.

    • superkret@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      8 days ago

      There’s no reason to believe smaller supercomputers would have significantly different OS’s.
      At some point you enter the realm of mainframes and servers.
      Mainframes almost all run Linux now, the last Unix’s are close to EOL.
      Servers have about a 75% Linux market share, with the rest mostly running Windows and some BSD.

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
      0·
      8 days ago

      I wonder if the numbers are still this good if you consider more supercomputers.

      Great question. My guess is not terribly different.

      “Top 500 Supercomputers” is arguably a self-referential term. I’ve seen the term “super-computer” defined whether it was among the 500 fastest computer in the world, on the day it went live.

      As new super-computers come online, workloads from older ones tend to migrate to the new ones.

      So there usually aren’t a huge number of currently operating supercomputers outside of the top 500.

      When a super-computer falls toward the bottom of the top 500, there’s a good chance it is getting turned off soon.

      That said, I’m referring here only to the super-computers that spend a lot of time advertising their existence.

      I suspect there’s a decent number out there today that prefer not to be listed. But I have no reason to think those don’t also run Linux.

    • Thaurin@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 days ago

      A supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008 actually ranked 23 in TOP500 in June 2008.

      • tate@lemmy.sdf.org
        0·
        7 days ago

        I always forget that Windows Server even exists, because the name is so stupid. “windows” should mean “gui interface to os.”

        edit: fixed redundacy.

          • dan@upvote.au
            0·
            7 days ago

            The GUI is optional these days, and there’s plenty of Windows servers that don’t use it. The recommended administration approach these days is PowerShell remoting, often over SSH now that Windows has a native SSH server bundled (based on OpenSSH).

            • yogurtwrong@lemmy.world
              0·
              6 days ago

              That gives me the idea of windows server installed on bare metal configured as a lightweight game runner. (much like a linux distro with minimal wm)

              I’ve seen people using slightly modified windows server as an unbloated gaming OS but I’m not sure if running a custom minimal GUI on windows server is possible. You seem knowledgeable on the subject, with enough effort, is it possible?

          • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            0·
            7 days ago

            I’d say having a GUI is not inherently stupid. The stupid part is, if I understand it correctly, the GUI being a required component and the primary access method.

            • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
              0·
              6 days ago

              Yeah. Thankfully, Windows server cleaned up that stupidity starting around 2006 and finished in around 2018.

              Which all sounds fine until we meditate on the history that basically all other server operating systems have had efficient remote administration solutions since before 1995 (reasonable solutions existed before SSH, even).

              Windows was over 20 years late to adopt non-grapgical low latency (aka sane) options for remote administration.

              I think it’s a big part of the reason Windows doesn’t appear much on this chart.

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
        0·
        8 days ago

        How can there be N/A though? How can any functional computer not have an operating system? Or is just reading the really big MHz number of the CPU count as it being a supercomputer?

        • superkret@feddit.orgOP
          0·
          8 days ago

          Early computers didn’t have operating systems.
          You just plugged in a punch card or tape with the program you want to run and the computer executed those exact instructions and nothing else.
          Those programs were specifically written for that exact hardware (not even for that model, but for that machine).
          To boot up the computer, you had to put a number of switches into the correct position (0 or 1), to bring its registers in the correct state to accept programs.

          So you were the BIOS and bootloader, and there was no need for an OS because the userspace programs told the CPU directly what bits to flip.