Practical Technology

Everyone who follows super-computers knows that they run on Linux. Just one look at the latest Top 500 SuperComputer list confirms that. Today 91.8% of all super-computers run Linux. Alas, if you look at the latest list, you’ll also see that the U.S. now trails China in the super-computers. IBM’s new CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics [...]

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If you want a really, really fast computer, there are all kind of ways to build the hardware architecture, but one thing that almost all of them have in common is that they run Linux. The top spot now appears to belong to the Tianhe-1A , which means "Milky Way," at a research center at [...]

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The biggest, most powerful atom-smasher the world has ever seen, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), with its 17-mile underground loop and TeVs (Teraelectronvolts) of proton beams is finally up and running, with Linux in control. After some LHC engineering problems were fixed, CERN’s (European Organization for Nuclear Research) LHC is now back to work starting [...]

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Once upon a time, supercomputers used special vector model processors to achieve their then remarkable speeds. Then, at the turn of the 21st century, people began working out how to achieve record-breaking computer speed by linking hundreds or thousands of commercial microprocessors running Linux and connected with high-speed networking in MPP (massively parallel processor) arrays. [...]

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The Windows’ fan club likes to point out that Windows is far more popular than Linux. The reason for that has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with monopoly. Nothing shows that better than the semi-annual TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. In the latest ranking, where performance is everything [...]

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