The biannual Top500 report on the world’s biggest and best supercomputers has been released and shows that almost all of the top 500 now run Linux.<\/p>\n
According to the report<\/a> 91% of the top 500 – or 455 – run a version of the Linux operating system<\/a>. Windows-based machines account for 1% and Unix-based ones for 4.4%.<\/p>\n The report cements Linux’s position as the clear leader in the field of supercomputing. A year ago in June 2009, Linux accounted for 88.6%, or 443, of the top 500 supercomputers. In November 2009 that had increased to 89.2%.<\/p>\n The other big news in this release of the Top500 report is that China now occupies the number two position. Using a combination of Intel processors and NVidia Tesla graphical processing units (GPUs) the Nebulae supercomputer turned in a top performance of 1.271 petaflop\/s.<\/p>\n One petaflop\/s refers to one quadrillion calculations per second. <\/p>\n The Nebulae system, based at the National Super Computer Center in Shenzhen, is the fastest in theoretical peak performance. With a theoretical performance of 2.98 petaflop\/s the Nebulae could well secure the top spot in the next release of the report.<\/p>\n China also has a second system in the top 10, marking China as a serious competitor for the title of supercomputing superpower.<\/p>\n The top spot in the Top500 list still belongs to the Jaguar system at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Its peak performance was 1.75 petaflop\/s. Jaguar has a theoretical peak capability of 2.3 petaflop\/s.<\/p>\n Third spot went to the recently-ousted Roadrunner with a peak performance of 1.04 petaflop\/s.<\/p>\n With the top spots now regularly dominated by petaflop\/s systems, entry to the top 500 list is tougher than ever. The entry level for the Top500 list is now 24.7 teraflop\/s, up from 20 teraflop\/s six months ago.<\/p>\n The top supercomputer, the Jaguar, has 224 162 cores while the second-place Nebulae has 120 640 cores.<\/p>\n South Africa’s Tsessebe supercomputer, based at the Centre for High Performance Computing in Cape Town, was listed at position 461.<\/p>\n