Practical Technology

Quiz time. Get out your No. 2 computers and answer the following question: For the fastest and most reliable high-end computing for your enterprise, will your operating system be 1) Linux, 2) Solaris, 3) OpenVMS or 4) Windows?
OK, put your mice down. If you answered Linux, give yourself 10 points; Solaris, 9 points; OpenVMS, 8 [...]

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Microsoft encourages us to think of Linux, when we think of it as all, as an also-ran operating systems for nerds. The last thing Microsoft wants us to think about is that there are some spaces where Microsoft is a distant number two and Linux is on top. Too bad Microsoft, there are several such [...]

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The formal coronation of the world’s fastest supercomputer won’t happen until the ISC (International Supercomputer Conference) in Dresden Germany on June 17th and 20th, but we already know that the IBM supercomputer “RoadRunner” is the first computer to reach the 1 petaflop per second level. It’s operating system: a Red Hat Linux variant.
The RoadRunner, which [...]

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What do the BlueGene/L System, the BlueGene/P system and the New Mexico Computing Applications Center SGI system, based on the Altix ICE Integrated Compute Environment 8200 model, have in common?
First, they’re the top three fastest computers in the world, according to the latest Top 500 supercomputer list. Second, they all run Linux.
It’s not just [...]

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