Moore’s Law has ruled the development of computers for over 50 years (actually i

Question

Moore’s Law has ruled the development of computers for over 50 years (actually it has been officially tracked starting 1958).

The trend is evident in High Performance Computing (HPC) field as shown in this diagram on the right from Top500 website.

Notice that in the period depicted in the diagram from 1994 to 2016, there had been dramatic changes in system architecture of super computers. Hardware evolved from vector computers to Massively Parallel Computing to Clusters and now accelerators. In the mean time, parallel computing tools shifted from PVM to MPI and OpenMP. Popular interconnections changed a few times between propriety connectors and fast switches. This diagram is a vivid testimony that Moore’s Law is followed through a combined efforts of many things together   

Top500 website contains a wealth of statistics on these fast computer systems. Browse the website then answer Questions 1-3 using your knowledge in operating systems (Question 4 requires further reading of extra materials).

1) What are the most popular operating system among the top 500 supercomputers? What do you think makes it favored by supercomputing community? (10 points)

Performance Development 100 TFlaps 10 Tflops IT Flops 100 GFlops 1 Flops 100 MFlops 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2010 2012 2014 2016

Explanation / Answer

As of November 2016, 498 or 99.6% of the world's fastest supercomputers use the Linux kernel. The remaining two or 0.4%, run AIX, a variant of Unix.[8] Within those 99.6% running Linux, are the most powerful supercomputers including all those ranking as the top ten (and virtually all the fastest computers).
-Source Wikipedia

Now going by the above trends we can say the most or the only os that is popular among supercomputers is Linux or any other os based on Linux. I think we can enumerate few reasons for the same as:-

-The Linux kernel, created by Linus Torvalds, was made available to the world for free. It is an open source os which can be modified according to the requirement of the user and the needs of a particular system. Due to this it became quite popular and gained massive audience in it's nascent stage.

-Apart from that Linux is as much a phenomenon as it is an operating system. To understand why Linux has become so popular, it is helpful to know a little bit about its history. The first version of UNIX was originally developed several decades ago and was used primarily as a research operating system in universities. High-powered desktop workstations from companies like Sun proliferated in the 1980s, and they were all based on UNIX. A number of companies entered the workstation field to compete against Sun: HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Apollo, etc. Unfortunately, each one had its own version of UNIX and this made the sale of software difficult. Windows NT was Microsoft's answer to this marketplace. NT provides the same sort of features as UNIX operating systems -- security, support for multiple CPUs, large-scale memory and disk management, etc. -- but it does it in a way that is compatible with most Windows applications.

So the above reasons are responsible for making linux the preferred choice among hardcore developers.

Hope this helps.! Cheers!

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