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The Super Windows That...Couldn't

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 6 comments
ComputerWorld UK; By Glyn Moody 		Mail this story
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One of the more bizarre accusations flung by Microsoft at GNU/Linux over the years is that it doesn't scale. This is part of a larger campaign to portray it as a kind of “toy” operating system – fine for low-end stuff, but nothing you'd want to run your enterprise on. Sadly, that narrative has been rather undermined by the independent Top500 supercomputing sites ranking. Five years ago, the GNU/Linux family ran 36.80% of the top 500 supercomputers; worse, Windows ran on precisely one supercomputer.

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Comments (6)

Amazing scalability of Windows

jezuch ·
There was a small flurry of news recently about an announcement that Windows can now run on an amazing number of 256 processors. Wow! Compared to Linux's capability to run on 4096 CPUs (IIRC) it sure seems a lot... ;)
techiem2 ·
Hey, Windows is scalable! It crashes just as well on any number of CPUs. :P
ColonelPanik ·
I scaled the window, climbed out and never went back.
Scott_Ruecker Story submitter ·
A workmate has a box of Windows 3.1 on his desk..its so quaint and cute looking...if we had only known then...

;-)
gus3 ·
And if it's on today's hardware, it's probably pretty fast, too!

Dumb logic.

dinotrac ·
Never mind the maddening use of absolute percentages rather than appropriate ones, the logic is -- ummm --- wrong.

Not that Windows is a great platform for super computing. I have no idea.

But ...

Look at that list and you'll see that Unix (as in not Linux) entries are declining even more rapidly than Windows, even though Unix has a long history of supercomputing use. Look at the list again, and you'll see that Windows doesn't show up very often, but it does grab the number ten spot, so Windows can, at least, drive some powerful computing.

Linux, on the other hand, is free. Add as many processors as you want. Tinker with it to fit more precisely the kinds of applications you need to run.

Not just free -- priceless.

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