Hello,
The following is from the linux magazine.
"The Supercomputing 2005 Conference is being held this week in Seattle,
Washington, and with it comes the most recent "Top 500" list of the world's
500 fastest computers.
At 131,072 processors, the new and previous No. 1 is the United States
Department of Energy's IBM BlueGene/L system, installed at DOEÕs Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). In the last year, the machine has
doubled in size (again) and has now achieved a record Linpack performance of
280.6 teraflops per second. It is still the only system ever to exceed the
100 teraflops mark. In other news from the Top 500, the entry level for the
Top 10 exceeds 20 teraflops per second.
That's a whole lot of 'flops. The machines just keep getting bigger and
bigger, and faster and faster. And, increasingly, the Huge Iron systems run
Linux. In the latest Top 500 rankings, Linux powers 372 out of 500 machines
(74 percent). The number of Windows machines in the Top 500? Zero.
Microsoft wants to play in this space, but it seems unlikely that it will ever
make a dent. Clusters at the scale of the Top 500 are expensive, finicky
creatures with unusual appetities for specialized hardware and software. It
seems unlikely that Windows will ever be open enough to allow researchers to
lift the hood and tinker with performance. "
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc
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