“IBM has been one of the technology leaders in the
supercomputing field for years and the world’s fastest computer,
ASCI White, was actually built by IBM. With a computational
capability of 12.3 teraflops, 12.3 trillion calculations per
second, the ASCI White is used by the U.S. Department of Energy to
help ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear
weapons stockpile without real-world testing. IBM was also quick to
adopt Linux as an OS for their servers and super computers due to
its open source nature, the maturity of clustering software, and
the enthusiasm of the scientific community in working with Linux
clusters as a means of achieving high-performance super
computing.”
“According to IBM, Linux clusters will soon be the most widely
used architecture for parallel computing. To show that they’re
serious about Linux supercomputing they’ve recently announced that
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois will install two IBM Linux clusters,
creating the world’s fastest Linux supercomputer in academia, and
the fourth fastest supercomputer overall in the world.”
“IBM’s commitment to innovation and their early adoption of
the Linux OS goes to show that open source definitely has all the
potential and scalability needed to handle even the most demanding
computing tasks and opens up new possibilities in the field of
supercomputing, all due to Linux’ open source nature.”