China has the top supercomputer in the world but it still runs Linux

[ Thanks to Steven J.
Vaughan-Nichols for this link. ]

“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 the National University of
Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China.

“I say “appears” because the official Top 500 Supercomputer List
won’t be out until early November. Still, according to a New York
Times report, Jack Dongarra, the University of Tennessee computer
scientist who maintains the Top 500 ranking, said, the Tianhe-1A
“blows away the existing No. 1 machine,” which is a Cray XT5 Jaguar
at the National Center for Computational Sciences. Dongarra
concluded, “We don’t close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say
it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster.””

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