

Top500 Supercomputers - June 2011 - AbyCodes
http://top500.org/lists/2011/06/press-release

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AbyCodes
What is the reason behind Linux's dominance (91%) over other UNIX-like
operating systems; and especially BSD's lack of presence?

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tzs
These systems are all massive clusters. On the compute nodes they generally
run a lightweight kernel that provides minimal services--just what is needed
to run the payload application and support things like communication with
other nodes. That pretty much rules out the closed source Unix systems and
normal versions of Windows for the compute nodes, as they would include all
kinds of things you don't need that would take up resources that you'd rather
have available for computing. If you aren't going to develop your own
lightweight kernel for your compute nodes, you need an open source kernel to
strip down. So that basically brings it down to Linux and _BSD.

I'd guess Linux is dominant because it is more popular than _BSD on servers
and desktops, so the people who developed the kernels for the compute nodes
were simply more likely to be familiar with Linux.

