AS FAR as supercomputing is concerned, Microsoft is almost nowhere to be seen, especially at the higher tier. It's not because Microsoft is new in this area. It was several years ago that Bill Gates expressed his ambitions to take over supercomputing. Now he's mostly gone along with those ambitions.
CSIRO to reap 'lazy billion' from world's biggest tech companies
Australia's peak science body stands to reap more than $1 billion from its lucrative Wi-Fi patent after already netting about $250 million from the world's biggest technology companies, an intellectual property lawyer says.
Australia's fastest Linux computer makes CSIRO a leader
Hot on the heels of yesterday's Top500 supercomputer announcement comes a reminder that Australia is a significant player in the field with the only NVidia CUDA research centre in the southern hemisphere.
As everyone knows, GNU/Linux grew up as a project to create a completely free alternative to Unix. Key parts were written by Richard Stallman while living the archetypal hacker's life at and around MIT, and by Linus Torvalds – in his bedroom. Against that background, it's no wonder that one of Microsoft's approaches to attacking GNU/Linux has been to dismiss it on technical grounds: after all, such a rag-bag of code written by long-haired hippies and near-teenagers could hardly be compared with the product of decades of serious, top-down planning by some of best coding professionals money can buy, could it?
And thus was born the “Linux does not scale” meme – the idea that, yes, this stuff is free, but you get what you pay for: code that no enterprise could take seriously. Unfortunately for that narrative, GNU/Linux is not only able to scale rather well, but able to do it in perhaps the most demanding of environments – that of supercomputing.
Ten years ago, GNU/Linux had 10% of that market, according to the Top500 Supercomputers site, with Unix holding a pretty solid 85%. Five years ago, those numbers had nearly switched, with GNU/Linux holding 63%, and Unix 31%, and Windows running in splendid isolation on just one machine. A year ago, Windows had managed to crank that up by a massive 400% - to five machines; meanwhile, GNU/Linux was on 88% and Unix down to 4%.
High-performance computing (HPC) continues to gain in popularity as businesses face increasing pressure to process data faster and with greater precision. Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc., working in concert with third parties, are now making it easier for IT executives to take advantage of the benefits of supercomputing with a technology initiative developed in their joint Interoperability Lab based in Cambridge, Mass. The initiative brings value to the HPC market by helping customers realize greater IT infrastructure efficiency and subsequent cost savings. Today, Microsoft and Novell reported strong demand for their high-performance computing interoperability solution with 33 shared customers now deploying sophisticated server workload management across SUSE€® Linux Enterprise Server and Windows HPC Server.
In addition, PlateSpin Forge and PlateSpin Protect now offer the industry's only consolidated disaster recovery solution for both Windows and Linux, including SUSE€® Linux Enterprise from Novell.
--LinuxToday Managing Editor