Linux: It's a known fact. Supercomputers run on this operating system. In the last Top500 Supercomputer, held in June 2017, 498 of the 500 supercomputers ran Linux. The remaining two used Unix as their operating system.
These were two Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX and located at the bottom of the list. The machines were found in positions 493 and 494, and from the Top500 that took place in November 2016, these supercomputers fell over 100 positions.
At this rate, Tux's operating system will have the dominant position in the next Top500 competition, which is held every two years.
When the first supercomputer list was created by the Top500 in June 1993, Linux was more like a game than a serious operating system and had not yet adopted Tux as its mascot.
Since 1998, when it first appeared in the Top500, Linux has rapidly dominated ultramodern computing.
Before Linux took the lead, Unix was the top operating system of supercomputing. However, since 2003 Top500 showed Linux surpassing Unix and by 2004, Linux had taken the lead for good.
Why?
According to the report from The Linux Foundation, Linux's rise in the 20 years of Top500.org Supercomputer competitions, with advances in computing performance, is due to two reasons.
First:
The majority of the world's top supercomputers are hyper-scalable research machines built for specialized tasks. Each supercomputer is an autonomous project with unique characteristics and very high optimization requirements. Thus, it is not feasible to develop a custom operating system for each system. With Linux, engineering teams can easily modify and optimize the operating system due to its open nature, with pioneering designs that characterize modern supercomputers.
Second and equally important:
“The licensing cost of a customized, self-supported Linux distribution is the same, whether it is used on 20 nodes or on 20 million nodes”.
Thus, “by leveraging the massive open‑source community that the operating system has, the projects had access to free support resources and developers, which keeps developer costs equal to or lower than other operating systems”.
Thus, the supercomputing power, and many computers besides the desktops that run Windows, will continue to use Linux.
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