December 5, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Likewise open-sources Active Directory authentication for Linux

Like it or lump it, Microsoft’s Active Directory is a very popular network directory, and thus, management system. It’s been possible to use AD for Linux, but it was never easy. Now, Likewise Software, formerly Centeris, a leader in mixing and matching Windows and Linux network solutions, has announced the first open-source version of release of version 4.0 of its cross-platform authentication software: Likewise Open.

This is an open-source community project that enables core AD authentication for Linux. Likewise Open’s source code is available today under the GPLv3. With this code, experienced Linux users and Linux vendors can integrate open-sourced AD Linux authentication into their distributions. The company has already packaged versions of Likewise Open for openSUSE 10.3, Fedora 8, and Ubuntu 7.10.

With Likewise Open, users will be able to use a single log-in and password for both their Windows and Linux PCs to gain access to a Windows or Samba-based network resources. The program also enables credential caching for offline log-on in the event of temporary loss of connectivity to the Active Directory Domain Controller. Last, but not least, users can also use this single log-in for a SSO (single sign on) for SSH (Secure Shell) and PuTTY sessions.

For administrators, Likewise Open will enable them to apply AD security settings on individual Linux machines to enforce password complexity and aging. In the future, it will be possible to use other AD management tools on Linux systems.

Gerald Carter, a senior Likewise Software developer and long-time member of the Samba core development team, will serve as the Likewise Open’s project director.

“Likewise Open represents our commitment to providing solutions that foster true interoperability between Windows and Linux for enterprise organizations,” Carter said in a statement. “Making Likewise Open available will help a number of organizations that have had difficulties with authentication across multiple platforms. We look forward to working with our technology partners and the open-source community to continue to improve authentication and access management solutions for mixed network environments.”

This could be a major step forward for Linux system acceptance in businesses using Windows-centric network. “Likewise Open will allow NIH [National Institutes of Health] to reduce costs by joining our Linux systems to Active Directory,” said Jeff Plum, a senior engineer at NIH. “By working with the open-source community, Likewise Software has made it easy for Linux distributors to include Active Directory authentication as part of the operating system and easy for centers like ours to deploy the solution.”

At the same time, Likewise Software isn’t doing this on its own and hoping that Linux companies will follow its lead. The company has already formally partnered with Red Hat and Canonical, Ubuntu’s sponsor and informally with Novell. Likewise Open will be incorporated into the next versions of Ubuntu, Red Hat and SUSE.

“We are excited about the Likewise Open project and the solutions that it will provide Canonical’s enterprise customers and other major deployments of Ubuntu,” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, in a statement. “Likewise Open allows us to provide end users of the Ubuntu operating system the ability to join their systems to Microsoft Active Directory for user authentication. We look forward to the debut of Likewise Open in the April release of Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support.”

Red Hat is on board too. “Likewise Open is an important development for our enterprise customers who wish to use open-source software to enable users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to authenticate against Active Directory,” said Karl Wirth, Red Hat’s director of security business. “We plan to ship Likewise Open together with Samba in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2.”

After an early evaluation of Likewise Open by eWEEK’s Jason Brooks, it’s easy to see why the Linux vendors are enthusiastic about Likewise Open. While not perfect, it makes integrating AD and Linux systems much easier than the ad hoc, duct tape measures often used in the past to get AD and Linux working together.

The company also announced the release of the next commercial version of its AD/Linux and other operating system integration program: Likewise
Enterprise 4.0.

“The non-Windows desktop group policy advancements in Likewise Enterprise 4.0 are a significant advancement,” said Guy Lunardi, Novell’s senior product manager for the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

“With thousands of group policies to offer, Novell and Likewise Software are working with some of our largest SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop customers to lock down their desktops with Likewise Enterprise, for increased security and control. The ability to manage SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop machines using existing Active Directory group policies makes it even easier for customers to deploy Linux desktops alongside their existing Windows machines.”

Likewise Enterprise 4.0 includes more than 500 Active Directory Group Policies for managing Linux, Unix and Mac servers and desktops. These include policies for security, authentication and identification, log-on, display, message, logging and audit, file system and tasks.

It also includes Linux desktop support. With this, administrators can set Linux desktop user configuration settings from AD. Thus, managers can centrally manage Linux desktops, easily set consistent group policy, and lock down desktop security with their familiar AD management tools. You can apply settings for the most popular Linux desktop applications such as Firefox and Evolution.

You don’t have to manage AD from Windows with Likewise installed. Likewise makes it possible for Linux and Unix administrators to manage AD from their systems with the Likewise Administrative Console. This is a pluggable framework that provides MMC (Microsoft Management Console)-like functionality and runs on any Linux platform.

Likewise Enterprise 4.0 also allows local network managers to organize branch office organizational unit-level deployment and administration without enterprise domain administrative privileges. In addition, Likewise Enterprise 4.0 streamlines the customer’s ability to allow users and groups to access resources by linking cells to share attributes across organizational units.
A version of this story first appeared in Linux-Watch.

November 27, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

And the Best Community Linux Is…

he three biggest community Linuxes are Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. They’re all popular. They’re all good. But which is the best?

Desktop Linuxes are improving so quickly that its hard even for someone like me, who tracks operating systems the way some people track their favorite NFL teams game match-ups, to keep tabs on whats what with the latest distributions. Thats even true for the major community Linux distributions: Fedora 8, OpenSUSE 10.3 and Ubuntu 7.10.

Nonetheless, since Fedora 8 arrived in mid-November, Ive managed to use all three of them on my HP Pavilion a6040n desktop PC. This is an older, inexpensive system powered by a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 dual-core processor.

The a6040n has 2GB of 533MHz RAM. To store the operating system, applications and data, it uses a 320GB SATA (Serial ATA) hard drive running at 7,200 rpm. For the display, this PC uses an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 32MB of dedicated graphics memory. The graphic chip uses main memory for the rest of its requirements. While this is not an adequate system for Vista—2GB of RAM for Vista is about the equivalent of 512MB of RAM for XP Service Pack 2: doable, but not very pleasant—its more than enough machine for even cutting-edge Linuxes.

Now, I could go into great and painful detail about what I found, but my colleague at eWEEK, Jason Brooks, has already done that in his review of the Linux community powerhouse trio and its associated slide show.

So, I decided to take a different tack: “Which one is the best distribution?”

First, however, let me warn you right now that I didnt find a best, one-size-fits-all distribution. Frankly, I dont believe that such a thing exists. Everyone has different needs, different requirements. However, as I looked these over, it became clear to me that each of them is the best for a particular kind of user.

Lets start with the newest of the new: Fedora 8. Fedora is a cutting-edge distribution. In fact, its so cutting-edge that you can easy slice yourself, which would make it a bleeding-edge distribution. Now, if youre a real Linux expert, youll have a lot of fun with Fedora.

For example, Fedora, to the best of my knowledge, is the first mainstream distribution to include the PulseAudio sound daemon. This latest addition to the complex Linux audio world enables you to do everything from the trivial—such as setting the volume for individual applications—to the entertainingly complex—such as sending direct audio streams across the network to other PCs and audio devices. Since Im always fooling with cross-network multimedia and PulseAudio can run on pretty much anything, I find it a fascinating program. In my copious free time Im hacking away at getting iTunes remote speaker support to work with PulseAudio.

Or, on the less technical side, you can always customize your own Fedora using spins. Do you want a multimedia-specific version of Fedora, say something like the StartCom MultiMedia Edition Linux? Well, you can build your own Fedora Multimedia edition with a spin. Of course, it will help a lot if you already know, for example, how ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture), EsounD and GStreamer all fit together to turn a media file into REM coming out of your speakers.

Get the idea? If you enjoy getting your hands dirty by really pushing the limits of Linux and open-source software, but youre not ready to join the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List), Fedora 8 is the perfect distribution for you.

Lets say though that you just want a good, solid Linux that wont give you too much trouble about using proprietary software and codices. Or, youre still getting your feet wet with Linux and you can use all the handholding you can get. Or, better still, youd really just like to get a brand-name computer with Linux already installed and ready to go. If any of those cases sound like you, then you, my friend, are ready for Ubuntu 7.10.

For Joe User, Ubuntu has it all. Its easy to use, and thanks to the extremely active and supportive Ubuntu community, if you do run into trouble, help is never far away.

If the last thing you want to do is to actually get to know Linux, you just want a computer that runs and doesnt get attacked on a daily basis by the latest botnet or rootkit, Ubuntu is for you. There are several hardware vendors who offer PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed. In particular, you can get the cheapest full PC on the market, the Everex TC2502 gPC, or any of several Dell laptops and desktops with Ubuntu ready to go.

To my way of thinking, Ubuntu is the perfect distribution for Linux newcomers and people who just want a great, reliable general-purpose Linux desktop.

Finally, if you want a desktop thats great for business but you dont mind pushing the edge of the technology envelope a little, then OpenSUSE 10.3 is for you. Now, if you dont want to take any chances, OpenSUSEs commercial big brother, SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP1, is what you should buy. But if you know your way around Linux, OpenSUSE 10.3 works great as a business desktop.

What do I mean by that? As a business user, I need a desktop that can work in complicated network. Like many business networks, my LAN includes servers that use the old-school NT domain style networking as well as AD (Active Directory) for Windows and Samba-based resources. I also need access to a local NFS (Network File System) server and remote servers that I access with OpenSSH and FTP. And I do all this at the same time. Can you copy and paste a file from an NTFS (NT File System) Windows 2003 drive on an AD tree to a Linux server using ReiserFS 500 miles away over FTP—or, better still, vice versa? With OpenSUSE I can do it without driving myself crazy with manually twisting network configuration files.

You can also dislike Novell all you want for making friends with Microsoft, but let me tell you, Novells OpenOffice 2.3, which comes with OpenSUSE 10.3, does a heck of a job at converting documents from ODF (Open Document Format) into the Microsoft Office formats that my editors prefer to see. I doubt very much that some of my co-workers even know that when they see my work that its never actually been in Microsoft Office. It may not be politically correct in open-source terms but it keeps the workflow running smoothly.

Thats the point of OpenSUSE. It works extremely well even in offices where Windows is still an important server and the dominant desktop operating system. Sure, you can get other versions of Linux do this, but OpenSUSE has already been built for it.

So, there you have it. Three Linux distributions and the three jobs they’re the best for.

A version of this story first appeared in eWEEK.

November 26, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Cheap Laptops Bad for Vista, Good for Linux

The good news for everyone is that you can get a good, solid laptop for under a grand these days. The bad news for Vista users is that many of those laptops, even though theyre sold with Vista, have nothing like enough resources to run Vista decently.

This year, from everything Ive seen, has lived up to the Merrill Lynch prediction that 2007 would be the year that notebooks overtook desktops to become the bigger revenue generator for PC makers. For some companies, like Hewlett-Packard, laptops have become the single most important revenue source.

There are a couple of reasons for this and they’re closely tied together. First, a PC vendor can make more profit on an under-$1,000 laptop than it would on a PC at the same price. At the same time, with Wi-Fi being available essentially everywhere and laptop prices falling below the magic $1,000 mark, more and more customers, both consumer and business, are turning to laptops.

Theres only one little problem with this if your company name is Microsoft. Those under-$1,000 laptops cant run Vista worth a darn. In addition, Vista has become a bigger and bigger part of a laptops cost. So, if youre a PC vendor, you could either upgrade your hardware—and there goes your sweet price point; put Vista Home Basic on the system—which even Vista lovers admit is trash; or continue to sell Windows XP and give adventurous customers a Linux option.

Whats happened is that people arent upgrading their basic laptops. Computer price margins are razor-thin. If people want top-of-the-line laptop, vendors are happy to provide them at an appropriate price point. But Dell, HP, Acer, et al. know darn well that they sell more of their cheaper systems than premium ones.

When you see a cheap laptop, youre seeing one that almost certainly has a gigabyte or less RAM and some kind of embedded graphics chip like an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 8MB to 64MB dynamically allocated shared graphics memory. Vista really requires 2GB before it becomes usable, and theres no point in even trying to run Vistas Aero interface with that low level of graphical horsepower, or perhaps I should say ponypower.

So, what were seeing now is that some companies are actually selling systems with Vista Home Basic. For example, my wife was briefly tempted this weekend by an under-$500 Toshiba laptop with Home Basic. Dont bother to look for it, by the way, theyre all sold out.

Heres the point, though: Home Basic offers nothing, zilch, that you cant already get with XP Home. It doesnt even give you Aero as an option. You could argue that Vista is inherently better than XP—I dont know that youll find anyone whod believe you, but you could try.

It doesnt come to any surprise to me that Acer and Dell would both rather have you buy XP than Vista. Oh, I know, youll find those “Acer recommends Windows Vista Business for Business Computing” labels and the like on their Web pages. But talk to the salespeople. Youll find it fascinating how happy they are to direct you to XP.

After all, its in their best interests to point you toward XP. XP is more stable and works with more software and equipment than Vista does, so it costs the companies less in technical support. In addition, they make a bit more money if they sell you XP.

And, Dell and some smaller companies, like Asus with its tiny Eee PC 4G UMPC (ultramobile PC), are also selling Linux-powered laptops. Here, the vendors make even more upfront profit per unit and by pushing technical support to the Linux community or vendors.

For example, that under-$500 Toshiba laptop with Home Basic? With 512MB of RAM and embedded Intel graphics, even the already mediocre Home Basic is still going to suck dead snakes through rusty tailpipes. Stick any Linux distribution on it, say Fedora 8, gOS 1.02 or OpenSUSE 10.3, and youve got a really useful laptop.

Total additional cost? About a buck for the burnable DVD for the Linux distribution. Its not a matter of “if,” its a matter of when were going to see more Linux-powered laptops.

Do the math. Vista doesnt work for todays laptop market. XP and Linux do. Its really that simple.

A version of this story first appeared in eWEEK.

November 21, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Desktop Linux on the rise

What do Linux users want from their desktop? The Linux Foundation’s survey has the answers.

While the LF’s third annual desktop Linux survey doesn’t officially end until November 30th, the number of daily respondents have shrunk to a trickle and the Foundation is working on analyzing the results. This is an early look at the raw data.

For starters, almost 20,000 self-selected users filled out this year’s survey compared to fewer than 10,000 in 2006’s survey. The survey, which drew primarily from European users (51.5 percent) followed by North Americans (35.8 percent), found that the vast majority of Linux desktops (68.4 percent) are deployed in SOHOs (small office / home office) and small business settings having one to a hundred PCs running Linux. Medium-sized businesses with user bases of 101 to 500 (9.7 percent) and 1,001 to 5,000 (6.2 percent) Linux desktops came next.

In those businesses and organizations that have deployed Linux desktops, 39.5 percent are running Linux on more than half of their machines. Even in Linux-oriented groups, Windows remains the single most popular desktop system, with 59.6 percent running on half or more of their desktops.

Still, this survey helps support the recent Forrester study, which found that Linux is becoming a credible threat to Windows on the desktop. Indeed, another recent desktop operating system survey, by KACE, a systems management appliance company, found that more Windows users are considering migrating to Mac OS and/or Linux (44 percent) than to Vista (13 percent).

Another interesting result from the LF survey is that in most company and organizations, the Linux desktop is more commonly used than Linux servers. From almost the beginning of Linux’s business acceptance it has always been assumed that Linux was, is, and would continue to be more of a force on servers than on desktops. That appears to be changing.

A related surprise is that Linux desktops are no longer primarily used by developers or engineers. The survey found that 64 percent of Linux desktops are being used as client desktops. That is to say they’re being used as replacements for ordinary Windows desktops rather than for high-end workstations. Many companies and groups (51.4 percent) are, of course, also using Linux as a developer’s desktop.

These Linux desktop deployments are, for the most part (62.2 percent), real office deployments. Only a minority are deploying Linux in pilot tests.

Only 16.3 percent say they will not be using Linux on their desktops. Since this is an open survey for users who are interested in the Linux desktop, I suspect that this particular result indicates Windows users trying to twist the survey’s results. As a survey of Linux desktop users, which deliberately tried to attract such users, the survey’s bias is clearly toward the Linux desktop. Thus, the number of users who claim not to be using Linux should be taken with a grain of salt.

This conclusion is also supported by another survey question: “Do you have enough confidence in Linux today to use it for mission-critical applications?” There, the answer was 74.3 percent absolutely had that much trust in Linux, with 18.3 percent saying that they probably trusted Linux enough for mission critical use.

Preferred distributions

So what desktop Linux are people using in their organizations? The answer, which comes as no great surprise to anyone who’s been following desktop Linux lately, is the Ubuntu family of Linuxes, at 54.1 percent. This was followed by the Red Hat family — RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Fedora/CentOS) — with 50.2 percent. The Novell SUSE group — SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and openSUSE — came in third, with 35.2 percent

Yes, that does add up to more than 100 percent. It would seem that groups using Linux in the office have not standardized on a particular distribution, or even a distribution family. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that Linux desktop proponents see issues such as support and end-user training to present “an obstacle for some users” interfering with desktop Linux adoption.

For personal use, Ubuntu once more easily led the pack, at 55.4 percent. Here, though, the community Linuxes, such as Debian (22.2 percent), Gentoo (10.2 percent), Knoppix (7.1 percent), and PCLinuxOS (5.4 percent) become significant players. It was also interesting to see that the commercially supported, community Linux distributions — Novell’s openSUSE (19.5 percent) and Red Hat’s Fedora (16.7 percent) — are, like Ubuntu, important distributions both in the office and at home.

Applications

Given a choice of applications to run on their Linux desktops, most users would prefer to run a native Linux application rather than a Windows application. In particular — Adobe take note — Linux users continue to really want Linux versions of Adobe’s Photoshop and Dreamweaver. These were numbers one and three on the Linux users’ Windows application migration wish list. Autodesk’s AutoCAD was number two.

If Linux users can’t run a particular application on Linux, and there’s no native program that gives them similar functionality, they’re almost perfectly divided between three different methods to get them their required program. These are using WINE, or a software built on WINE, such as Crossover Linux, to run the Windows application in Linux; virtualization; and switching to a browser-based application, such as Google Docs.

Device support

Device support, as always, remains a major concern among desktop Linux users. Printers, this time, took first place for the most trouble over the ever-popular WiFi network adaptors. It’s not that printers aren’t supported well in Linux — they are. It’s that users want all the bells and whistles that come on modern printers and all-in-one devices. These concerns are well known to Linux developers and are being addressed by Greg Kroah-Hartman and his group of device developers.

For printers, at a recent meeting of the Open Printing Group in Tokyo, developers and printer vendors got together to work in common purpose on improving general Linux and printer compatibility. In addition, the group is working on giving both the KDE and GNOME desktops a common printer dialog to make it easier for both users and vendors to access a printer’s full capabilities regardless of the underlying distribution.

Finally the survey, perhaps reflecting that it was filled out mostly by users who have already taken the Linux plunge, found that pre-installed Linux desktops — such as Dell’s Ubuntu lines — aren’t all that attractive. 57 percent said that pre-installed Linux met their needs, while only 43 percent were willing to buy pre-installed Linux systems.

However you read the survey’s specific results, one thing comes through loud and clear. The Linux desktop is being deployed in businesses today, and its numbers are increasing rapidly. Personally, I still consider 2005, which marked the release of SLED 9.3, to be the “Year of the Linux Desktop.” The LF survey, and the others I mentioned earlier, all show that the Linux Desktop tipping point has already happened and we’re still living through its resolution

A version of this story first appeared in Desktop Linux.

November 19, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Canonical to release Launchpad developer service

Early this week, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will be releasing its Launchpad Personal Package Archive service, a new way for developers to build and publish packages of their code, documentation, artwork, themes and other contributions to the Ubuntu environment on desktop, server and now mobile environments.

PPA, which has been in beta since July, is a major part of Ubuntu’s own development system, Launchpad. Launchpad is a set of integrated tools that support collaboration and community formation. These include a team management tool, a bug tracker, code hosting, translations, a blueprint tracker and an answer tracker. Its best feature, the bug-tracker, works by trying to track separate conversations about the same bug in external project bug trackers, such as Bugzilla, Roundup, SourceForge and the Debian Bug Tracking System.

PPA enables solo and small groups of open-source software developers to collaborate on sets of packages and publish their own versions of their own or other free software programs. In PPA, developers can upload Ubuntu source packages to be built and published as an apt repository by Launchpad. The end results are programs that ordinary users can download and run on Ubuntu on any Ubuntu-supported architecture. In addition, PPA can create binary Ubuntu Linux compatible files for the x86 and AMD64 architectures.

PPA users get up to 1GB of Personal Package Archive space, which works as a standard Ubuntu software package repository. They also get a Web front-end where Launchpad users can browse and search for their programs.

During the Beta test, PPA developers have said that they appreciated the opportunity to get their programs to a much wider number of users testing than is normally the case with application packaging. Canonical also claims that PPA-developed packages are easier to deploy in complex environments and that it makes updating newer applications in older Ubuntu distributions much easier.

All this means that PPA gives developers the chance to work with their users directly. In turn, users who are interested in a particular program or set of programs can make a single update to their system to enable them to install packages from PPAs. Those users receive automatic updates whenever new versions of the packages are built and published in their particular PPAs.

Christian Robottom Reis, who has led the PPA effort within Canonical’s Launchpad project, explained, “Many developers want to modify existing packages, or create new packages of their software. The PPA service allows anyone to publish a package without having to ask permission or join the Ubuntu project as a developer.”

“This is a tremendous innovation in the free software community. We hope that PPA will make it easier for developers and development teams who have excellent ideas to get their work into the hands of users for testing and feedback. They also get to mix with experienced packagers to improve their skills. PPA is a build system, a publishing system and a community experience. We are also really excited to add the ability to create packages aimed at the mobile environment from launch.”

Personal Package Archives also make it easy for developers to test new and experimental software builds. Matt Zimmerman, Canonical’s CTO, said, “Adding a new feature to a package or building it against a new version of a system library requires extensive testing. A PPA allows a developer to form a community of testers who are interested in their changes. The testing community can install the packages, run them for the test period and then remove them cleanly from their system. If the developer releases an updated version, the Ubuntu Update Manager will automatically notify those testers and enable them to update to the newer versions with a single click. This creates a very efficient environment for developers and testers to improve their favorite software.”

The Launchpad PPA Service will be released for general use on November, 2007 in line with the regular Launchpad release cycle. The PPA Service will be available at the PPA Web site.

A version of this story was first published on Linux-Watch.

November 16, 2007
by sjvn01
2 Comments

The fastest computers are Linux computers

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 the crème de la crème of supercomputers that run Linux, however. 85.2 percent of the Top 500 supercomputers run Linux. In other words, 426 of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers depend on Linux.

Linux-powered supercomputers don’t require any particularly special version of Linux. New Mexico’s SGI Altix ICE, for example, run pretty much standard Novell SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) and Red Hat’s RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

One of the reasons why Linux owns HPC (high-performance computing) is that today’s supercomputers tend to be made up of clusters of multi-cored processors. Typically, these are dual-core CPUs. The one notable exception is that Intel’s quad cored Clovertown chips now power 102 of the Top 500. The vast majority of the fastest of the fast supercomputers, 354 systems, or 70.8 percent, now use Intel processors. Intel is followed by the AMD Opteron family, 78 system,s or 15.6 percent. After AMD, IBM takes third place with 61 systems, or 12.2 percent, that use IBM Power processors.

What does all this have to do with Linux? For starters, Linux runs natively on all these processors. The days when supercomputers from Cray and Control Data Corp. depended upon customized chips for their speed are long past. Today, speed comes from clustering standard chips into better and faster processor arrays and more effective parallel processing programming. For example, a single SGI Altix ICE 8200 rack can hold up to 512 common-as-dirt Intel Xeon processor cores. Today’s supercomputer processors are then tied together into a three-dimensional matrix by high-speed intraconnect fibre.

Linux has excelled at getting the maximum of performance from the minimum of commodity equipment for more than a decade now. In 1994, Thomas Sterling and Don Becker, at Goddard Space Flight Center’s CESDIS (Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences) created the first Beowulf Linux-powered clustered supercomputer. Even with that first system, which was made up of 16 486-DX4 processors connected by channel bonded Ethernet, it was clear you could deliver supercomputing performance with COTS (Commodity off the Shelf) based systems.

Since then, the story of supercomputing is really the story of Starling and Becker’s initial ideas, implemented with Linux and ever-faster COTS processors and networking, taking computers to ever-faster speeds. Thirteen years later, the BlueGene/L has achieved a Linpack benchmark performance of 478.2 Tflop/s (teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second).

That record won’t stay up for long, though. In just the last six months, to be a top 100 supercomputer, almost all of them Linux-powered, the entry point for the top 100 in March 2007 was 9.29 Tflop/s. Now, the slowest of the top 100 runs at 12.97 Tflop/s. With Linux, the sky, and perhaps Moore’s law, are the only limits for how fast computers can go.

A version of this story first appeared in Linux-Watch.

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