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Ah hahahaha!!!
Windows! Some dumbass put Windows on a supercomputer!
Probably need one, just for the benchmark comparisons.
Oh Xserve, we hardly knew ye 😢
A supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008 actually ranked 23 in TOP500 in June 2008.
I always forget that Windows Server even exists, because the name is so stupid. “windows” should mean “gui
interfaceto os.”edit: fixed redundacy.
But Windows Server has GUI. Although a server having GUI (not webui, desktop) is kinda stupid
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).
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?
I don’t think I know enough to answer that question, sorry!
And Mac! Whatever that means 🤣
Surprised to learn that there were windows based Supercomputers.
Those were the basic entry level configurations needed to run Windows Vista with Aero effects.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No vista still sucked with every nagging pop-up.
TweakUAC solved that problem.
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.
What would the other be
TempleOS
When you really have to look deep into god’s mind you just have to put templeOS on a supercomputer.
If you install TempleOS on the fastest supercomputer Frontier, you get Event Horizon.
WARNING: Gory, disturbing pictureWhat movie/tv show is this image from?
Event Horizon
Praise be upon him
a glowie’s worst nightmare
Thanks for the links!
Wait what Mac?
The Big Mac. 3rd fastest when it was built and also the cheapest, costing only $5.2 million.
Oh Xserve, we hardly knew ye 😢
Interesting. It’s like those data centers that ran on thousands of Xboxes
Mac is a flavor of Unix, not that surprising really.
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.
Mac is also also derived from BSD since it is built on Darwin
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
There was a time when a bunch of organisations made their own supercomputers by just clustering a lot of regular computers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(supercomputer)For Windows I couldn’t find anything.
If you google “Windows supercomputer”, you just get lots of results about Microsoft supercomputers, which of course all run on Linux.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
No there was HPC sku of Windows 2003 and 2008 : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2003#Windows_Compute_Cluster_Server
Microsoft earnestly tried to enter the space with a deployment system, a job scheduler and an MPI implementation. Licenses were quite cheap and they were pushing hard with free consulting and support, but it did not stick.
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.
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
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!)
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.
Thank you, i was hoping there was something official that i had missed.
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.
about 10 q5vyrs ago
Have you been distracted and typed a password/PSK in the wrong field 8)
Lol typing on phone plus bevy. Can’t defend it beyond that
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.
Except this time the Unix-like took 100% of the market
Was too clear this thing is just better
We’re gonna take the test, and we’re gonna keep taking it until we get one hundred percent in the bitch!
Would the one made out of playstations be in this statistic?
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.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.
Now the real question is what package manager are they using? apt or yum? Lol
They are using pacman obviously :)
So you’re telling me that there was a Mac super computer in '05?
If I recall correctly they linked a bunch of powermacs together with FireWire.
Maybe windows is not used in supercomputers often because unix and linux is more flexiable for the cpus they use(Power9,Sparc,etc)
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.current fastest runs on SUSE Enterprise Linux
No wayyy! Why SUSE tho?
Suoer-computing is a pain-in-the-ass, so my guess is some combination of SUSE picking up top talent that left other Linux vendors as IBM has been purchasing them, and SUSE just being willing to put in the extra work for the added brand recognition.
Because all the Arch consultants were busy posting on the internet.
I’m confused on why they separate BSD from Unix. BSD is a Unix variant.
So is Linux. So I guess the light blue is all other UNIX variants?
