Why do all supercomputers in the world use linux?
In: Technology
On a very fundamental level, there have been two significant operating systems: UNIX and MS-DOS. Windows was originally a graphical user interface on MS-DOS. Mac OS, UNIX. Over the years, a huge number of operating systems have been created as derivatives of these, evolving and changing to suit specific needs. Windows and Mac have evolved as lay-user facing, intuitive systems designed for use on single machines. They’ve got support for some degree of networking, like accessing shared drives, but their intended use case is one person, one machine.
Linux is an off shoot of UNIX created by Linus Torvalds in the early 90s. Since then, many others have worked on creating a variety of versions of it which have different intended use cases. Some (like Linux Mint) are designed to be very end user friendly and work “out of the box”. Others, like Arch Linux, give ultimate control of every aspect of the OS to the end user, which allows for extremely customized builds that can be optimized to specific tasks and hardware. Some of your favorite operating systems, like Android and Chrome OS, are “forks” of popular Linux OSs that have been customized.
So why is Linux the OS of choice for supercomputing? A big part of it is the customization aspect. OSs that are designed to be end-user friendly are set up in a way that makes it difficult for you to accidentally delete or modify essential system files. While this is a great security feature, it can make it difficult to do things like install software or code libraries into non standard locations or have multiple versions of the same program installed simultaneously. It can also be more easily configured to use huge numbers of CPUs. The open-source nature of Linux makes it attractive to developers (who are easily able to dig in and modify whatever they wish and share it without paying for developer licenses or concerns about proprietorship), which means there is also a huge amount of existing code to facilitate just about any process you want to do on Linux.
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