Linux is the OS of choice for all Top 500 supercomputers, here’s why

Dimapur, Oct. 4 (EMN): Japan’s supercomputer Fugaku is the fastest supercomputer in the world at the moment. Fugaku, another name for Mount Fuji, dethroned the US ‘Summit’ supercomputer from IBM on the Top 500 list, a ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Top 500 is an independent project launched in 1993 to benchmark supercomputers with its LINPACK Benchmark where a computer is given a dense system of linear equations to solve. In the Top 500 benchmark, Fugaku scored 415.5 petaflops, 2.8 times as fast as IBM’s Summit, the nearest competitor.

This is the first time that an ARM based computer has topped the list. Fugaku is co-developed by Riken and Fujitsu and makes use of Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX system-on-chip. It also uses Linux as its operating system (OS) and so does all the remaining 499 of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

A brief history on Linux

The year is 1991 and Linus Torvalds, a student from the University of Helsinki, announces his pet project on the internet: An early stage Linux operating system kernel developed on MINIX using the GNU C compiler. In 1992 Linux supports a Graphical User Interface or GUI for the first time after the X Window System was ported to Linux by Orest Zborowski.

In 1994, Thomas Sterling and Donald Becker at NASA wanted to build a supercomputer made up of a cluster of standard PCs as a cost-effective alternative to large supercomputers. They ended up developing Beowulf, a cluster of 16 Intel 486 DX4 processors that ran on Linux. The success of the project inspired many similar projects with Linux as the go to OS.

In the late nineties, IBM began looking at Linux as the operating system to pave new ways of creating mission-critical enterprise software. In 2000, IBM announced that it would fully embrace the Linux ecosystem for it systems strategy. A year later, IBM invested $1 billion to back the Linux movement, embracing it as an operating system for IBM servers and software.

In 2008, the first commercial Android device, T-mobile G1, was launched in the United States. The device ran on the mobile Android OS by Google which is based on a modified version of the Linux 2.6 kernel.

In 2020, we cannot escape Linux because it is everywhere. It runs the cloud and it runs the servers where the majority of websites, web applications and online services are hosted on. If you have accessed the internet with your non-Apple device then you have used Linux.

Why do all supercomputers run Linux?

The main reason why Linux is so popular with supercomputers is its open source nature. Building a supercomputer is an expensive affair. Ideally you would want to cut costs by avoiding a proprietary operating system that charges license fees for every processor or user. Linux being a free open source OS makes it an ideal candidate.

Linux is also a modular system. It is highly customisable and can be stripped down to its basic kernel version. Supercomputers are machines built for a specific purpose. You would want to remove some unnecessary code from the OS to increase performance and eliminate potential bugs.

Linux is highly scalable due to the generic nature of its kernel. It can run on either giant systems or smaller systems. This makes it possible to make Linux kernels run on 2mb systems as well as 1tb systems without any problem.

Linux has been tried and tested for decades. Being an open source OS the community support is unparalleled among other systems. It has been the standard for building large multi-processor clusters for years now and its abilities as a supercomputing OS has been enhanced over the years. The code contributed by projects around the world has helped shape Linux as the undisputed OS king for similar supercomputing projects.

Here is a year-wise list of Linux system shares of all Top 500 supercomputers:

List	Count	System Share (%)
Jun-20	514	102.8
Nov-19	500	100
Jun-19	500	100
Nov-18	500	100
Jun-18	500	100
Nov-17	500	100
Jun-17	498	99.6
Nov-16	498	99.6
Jun-16	497	99.4
Nov-15	494	98.8
Jun-15	489	97.8
Nov-14	486	97.2
Jun-14	485	97
Nov-13	482	96.4
Jun-13	476	95.2
Nov-12	469	93.8
Jun-12	462	92.4
Nov-11	457	91.4
Jun-11	457	91.4
Nov-10	460	92
Jun-10	456	91.2
Nov-09	448	89.6
Jun-09	442	88.4
Nov-08	439	87.8
Jun-08	427	85.4
Nov-07	427	85.4
Jun-07	391	78.2
Nov-06	376	75.2
Jun-06	367	73.4
Nov-05	372	74.4
Jun-05	318	63.6
Nov-04	305	61
Jun-04	291	58.2
Nov-03	198	39.6
Jun-03	139	27.8
Nov-02	71	14.2
Jun-02	67	13.4
Nov-01	39	7.8
Jun-01	44	8.8
Nov-00	54	10.8
Jun-00	28	5.6
Nov-99	18	3.6
Jun-99	17	3.4
Nov-98	1	0.2
Jun-98	1	0.2