
Linux Runs All of the World’s Fastest Supercomputers - okket
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/linux-runs-all-of-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputers/
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doener
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15707800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15707800)

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kev009
There are a lot of people gloating about this on Twitter and elsewhere, but to
me it just seems sad; the ultimate morass of monoculture and an endgame with
no competition. An ode to "the OS layer no longer matters, don't bother
putting any effort into it someone else will". Bystander paradox.

I know Linux fans don't see it that way.. young me thought Linux was
indomitable and it was foolish for any company and group of people to not
invest all their time and efforts into it. Older me knows better, that's not
how corporations and groups of people work best. It leads to stagnation and
apathy. It kills the fertile ground for ideas needed to make non-linear
progression.

I don't know the solution to all this, but systems software is really going
the way electronics engineering and circuit design have gone. I am sure
executive types without engineering background would love to "outsource" it
all to the perceived interchangeable cogs in "low cost regions".. but the rate
of technological progress is about to drop of a cliff if my generation doesn't
pick up the torch real soon now.

That said, it is somewhat premature as another commentator points out IBM's
CNK. CNK is inventor's thinking.. the gall to ask "do we even need a general
purpose OS?" regardless of what the market or eventual answer may be.

~~~
icelancer
>> There are a lot of people gloating about this on Twitter and elsewhere, but
to me it just seems sad; the ultimate morass of monoculture and an endgame
with no competition. An ode to "the OS layer no longer matters, don't bother
putting any effort into it someone else will". Bystander paradox.

>>I know Linux fans don't see it that way..

I am not a Linux fan per se (as I type this from my Win10 desktop), but I
legitimately don't understand what your comment is about. I've read it a few
times and I'm still not exactly sure what you are complaining about.

How is Linux a monoculture, or this the endgame... or this stagnation?

I can't figure out what you are saying, sorry.

~~~
sspiff
For big metal rigs like supercomputers, there is almost no choice but Linux.
Combined with Linux' dominance of the server market in general, there's a risk
emerging to get stuck in a monoculture on the OS layer.

Most companies, including very big ones with a long history of OS development
are abandoning their efforts in favor of just using Linux. The perception is
often that there is no innovation that can be done on the OS layer that will
earn back its investment.

This leads to a lack of experimentation, tunnel vision, and in the long run
stagnation.

~~~
gtirloni
Companies experiment on Linux everyday. Unless they want to use a different
programming language, they can implement all sorts of innovation in the Linux
Kernel without incurring in massive overhead costs of rolling their own.

I don't think the situation is nearly as bad as portrait here.

They can always use *BSD as a second choice too.

Additionally, where's the stagnation we are so worried about here? Any real
world examples?

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ThrowawayR2
> _Additionally, where 's the stagnation we are so worried about here? Any
> real world examples?_

BeOS? Singularity? Plan 9? Hell, just read the last 20 years of OS research
and realize that large swathes of it will never get used because anything that
gets implemented has to be compatible with the way the Linux kernel does
things. (By way of analogy, consider the x86 architecture, also a '70s era
technology, and the massive contortions Intel had to go through to maintain
compatibility over the years while adding new features and how all the newer
alternative architectures died in the marketplace because x86 was too
entrenched.)

Fuschia and, ironically, Windows are the last hopes for advancing OS
architecture and that's really only possible because the semi-monopolists that
created them have enough cash and engineering talent to push them until they
take off.

~~~
gtirloni
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear.

We are talking about HPC computing and how Linux being the only viable choice
leads to stagnation.

You are proposing those OSes advance the status quo (and I agree) but how is
it that HPC computing is stagnated because Linux is the only viable option? If
anything, HPC would be an awesome testbed for those experimental OSes and they
still choose Linux.

Where's HPC stagnated because awesome ideas from other OSes can't be used?

Finally, are these other ideas so extremely awesome that they require a new OS
from scratch (with all the uphill battle that it's to create it)? Can they be
implemented on top of the Linux kernel? In which case, is Linux's success
really such a bad thing?

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gbrown_
Whilst it seems it is possible for the compute nodes of a Blue Gene to run
Linux [1], I doubt all of them are doing so in the Top 500 and that most still
run IBM's CNK.

[1]
[http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4453.pdf](http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4453.pdf)

~~~
nigwil_
You are correct, the compute nodes run CNK. BG/Q has a few Power7 servers
running Red Hat that run the cluster control, job scheduler etc

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fh973
I sometimes wonder: what will happen to Linux when there is no Linus Torvalds
as a lead architect anymore?

I just have an outsider perspective, but it seems that he still has to
intervene every now and then to maintain a coherent architecture. Could anyone
else fill this role, ie. be willing, able and empowered?

~~~
qznc
I believe the general philosophy (never break user space) is deeply ingrained
into all long term kernel devs.

There is a possibility that Linux splits into multiple variants (server,
supercomputer, desktop, embedded, ...), but as long as the licences are
compatible I see no problem.

~~~
digi_owl
Hardly.

Just the other day there was a spat between a security guy and Torvalds, where
the security guy wanted to push a patch set that would crash even the kernel
if something in userspace made it do something "funny".

And said security guy have a whole bunch of cheerleaders in userspace (quite a
few stepped onto social media to defend the patch set and berate Torvalds for
being a potty mouthed bully), and perhaps even a few in kernel space.

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jdblair
> Since its release 26 years ago, Linux has not only persisted–it has come to
> dominate every market it enters.

Except the mainstream desktop. Linux has not dominated the desktop, nor do I
expect it ever will, at least not the desktop in its current form.

(I remember back in 1999 I would tell people that Linux would eventually rule
the desktop, we just had to take a long view of at least 10 years. I can now
say empirically that 10 years is not a long enough view.)

~~~
pimeys
While desktop market is dead and Linux will not be mainstream in that market,
it is an excellent choice as a developer desktop. Fast, super easy to install
everywhere and has the best possible packaging systems to get all the software
you need. If choosing the right distro, you don't need yearly updates that
break your tools or a credit card to use the proprietary app store for certain
libraries needed for your open source pipeline.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but in 2017 and being a developer, I'd take a
serious look how nice of an OS it actually is.

~~~
jdblair
No argument here. I've been using Linux as a developer system since about
1996.

~~~
pimeys
Around 1997 for me. Redhat 5.0 was my first distro, if I remember correctly...

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gnufx
The article is misleading in more ways than ignoring what the BG/Qs run and
the contentious claim that Linux is "the right match", whatever
"supercomputing" means. The term is devalued in this context. Nearly the list
is not HPC systems in the sense that they could usefully run quantum chemistry
at scale; dismiss the Ethernet ones.

The HPL number is acknowledged as bad, even by the standard of single
performance numbers. It basically reflects the number and width of the vector
units and use of a good BLAS. [https://hpgmg.org/](https://hpgmg.org/) seems a
better choice if you must have a single HPC benchmark number. (HPCG, touted to
replace HPL, depends on how you re-write it, which you must to avoid
essentially STREAM results.)

It's also worth pointing out that much of the capacity there isn't even on an
OS kernel, but is off-loaded, and I wonder what multiple entries for "service
provider x" actually are as "systems".

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tomrod
Now if we Linux users could just get some first-class gaming support!

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goldfeld
What'd a supercomputer ever want Windows or OSX layers on for? Linux is too
obvious.

~~~
giancarlostoro
You're forgetting Unix / BSD variants which can be quite competitive in their
own respect as well.

~~~
jsjohnst
I still miss the days where Yahoo! was a FreeBSD shop. I think the conversion
to Linux was a bad idea on several levels and was motivated by the wrong
reasons. And I have been a heavy Linux user since 1995 (used it from 1993, but
didn’t use it heavily till 1995), yet still feel that way.

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hsnewman
Well, with the Intel ME recent findings, actually Minix is on all of those
computers as well as any other modern Intel based computer...

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CodeWriter23
Does that mean they’re in for a nice upgrade by applying this patch?
[https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/04/26/the-linux-scheduler-a-
de...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/04/26/the-linux-scheduler-a-decade-of-
wasted-cores/)

~~~
Fnoord
This article is from ~april 2016, the last commit was on may 2016 [1]

[1]
[https://github.com/jplozi/wastedcores](https://github.com/jplozi/wastedcores)

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madez
I wonder if the linux foundation lobbied in Munich for Limux. I'm well aware
that the issue wasn't the windows kernel vs the linux kernel, but does that
matter for the public perception? For Max Mustermann, Linux lost in Munich.

Edit: Just for clarification, I didn't mean to suggest that the linux
foundation did lobby. I just wonder if they were thinking about it, and what
their decision was.

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duderino
Why not BSD? Could BSD be utilized for a supercomputer?

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dnautics
This was addressed in previous hn discussion and it boils down to specialized
support for certain HPC hardware. I think that also not having a focus on
scientific software probably also hurts.

