Why do all supercomputers in the world use linux?
In: Technology
Linux is a lot more customizable than windows. You can alter the OS in ways you can’t with windows to make it optimal for the supercomputer hardware. Windows is a heavier OS and isn’t really meant for supercomputers.
Can you imagine your important medical research being halted for a windows update?
Windows and macOS are mostly designed for mainstream computer use, and are built around it. Supercomputers have a lot of specialized hardware that work well outside “mainstream” operating uses. Linux by nature is much more versatile and can be relatively easily adapted for various needs and purposes, which enable it to be used for supercomputers and other specialized things.
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Operating systems has hardcoded limits like how many graphics cards can be installed, and a cheap supercomputer is a computer with a lot of high end graphics cards. You can’t change those limits unless you have the source code. Windows networking silently discards some protocols which can be used for a distributed system. With Linux you can have anything you want and need but it requires tweaking
Super-computers are highly specialized to operate on sets of data. The original “super” computers from companies like CDC and cray had custom operating systems.
These days the Linux kernel is free and provides all the basic IO functions needed. By using this super-computer vendors only have to write drivers and custom software while letting the Linux kernel handle all the plumbing.
It is simply cheaper and more-efficient to use a well known foundation instead of reinventing the wheel every time.
Because they’re all still waiting for Microsoft’s licensing team to figure out how many core licenses they need to purchase in order to be properly licensed, and if they should get Software Assurance to allow for moving workloads between nodes. They get a different answer each time too.
Ironically, one of the most popular benchmarks for supercomputers is the MS2022 Licensing Simulator. Some say it’s more complex that calculating all the possible moves in chess, which is already extremely difficult to do.
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.
Linux is heavily documented and it’s easy for developers to access kernel functions, that means they can manipulate how the way the OS works, not like Windows or MacOS who are propietary and to access their components you need to basically work for Microsoft and Apple, still then you won’t have total access to the source code.
Most software and embedded HW developers who work in scientific computing already know Linux, trust it, and know how to customize it. Why change away from that?
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