• Mwa@lemm.ee
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    7 hours ago

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

    • Matt@lemmy.ml
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      6 hours ago

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

      • Viper_NZ@lemmy.nz
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        1 hour 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.

      • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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        3 hours 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)

    • superkret@feddit.orgOP
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      7 hours 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).

    • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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      8 hours 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.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          I think this is a Ship of Theseus thing here that we’re going to argue about because at what point is it just UNIX-like and not UNIX?

          UNIX-like is definitely a descriptor currently used for Linux.

          Even the Wikipedia entry starts that way.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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    13 hours ago

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

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    So basically, everybody switched from expensive UNIX™ to cheap “unix”-in-all-but-trademark-certification once it became feasible, and otherwise nothing has changed in 30 years.

      • whaleross@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        Apple had its current desktop environment for it’s proprietary ecosystem built on BSD with their own twist while supercomputers are typically multiuser parallel computing beats, so I’d say it is really fucking surprising. Pretty and responsive desktop environments and breathtaking number crunchers are the polar opposites of a product. Fuck me, you’ll find UNIX roots in Windows NT but my flabbers would be ghasted if Deep Blue had dropped a Blue Screen.

  • Z3k3@lemmy.world
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    21 hours 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

    • gerdesj@lemmy.ml
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      20 hours ago

      about 10 q5vyrs ago

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

      • Z3k3@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        Lol typing on phone plus bevy. Can’t defend it beyond that

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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          19 hours 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.

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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            14 hours 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
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              10 hours 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
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                4 hours 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 other are running on it, but not, to my knowledge, about what it is compared 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 into he 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.

              • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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                5 hours 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.

          • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.uk
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            18 hours 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
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              15 hours 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
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              15 hours 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.

      • Z3k3@lemmy.world
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        21 hours 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

    • superkret@feddit.orgOP
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      21 hours 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.

    • A7thStone@lemmy.world
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      21 hours 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.

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
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        13 hours 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
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          8 hours 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.

        • sep@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          They ofcouse had one, probably linux, or unix. But that information, about the cluster, is not available.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    We’re gonna take the test, and we’re gonna keep taking it until we get one hundred percent in the bitch!

  • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
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    21 hours 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
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      21 hours 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
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      19 hours 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.