8 ms·

Serious question (not in IT), what else can they run?

Manozco 9y ago
NetBSD because "Of course it runs NetBSD" :)
wmf 9y ago
IIRC at one point Microsoft paid one of them to run Windows and years ago there was one running OS X. Decades ago during the Unix Wars there used to be proprietary HPC OSes.
- astrodust 9y ago
  When Cray and SGI were still in the game there was a lot more operating system diversity. Apple's Xserve cluster was an interesting experiment but it never really went anywhere.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > Apple's Xserve cluster was an interesting experiment but it never really went anywhere. A pity Apple does not manufacture real servers any more. With the old cheesegrater-mac-pros, which were the last thing available after the Xserve death, you at least have the option to put in 4 disks and do a RAID setup, but no remote power/console management or a serial port...
    - astrodust 9y ago
      They've acknowledged the "trash can" design was a mis-step and they're working to correct it, so there's that. Competing in the server market was very difficult for Apple, their needs are often radically different from consumer or even "pro"-consumer. They realized the couldn't "win" at servers, so backing out was the best bet for them.
      - mschuster91 9y ago
        > They realized the couldn't "win" at servers, so backing out was the best bet for them. The need for servers is there, or otherwise the "macOS Server" would not be in the App Store. It actually is really nice, it provides everything needed for a business: LDAP, file server, mail, calendar, webserver, TimeMachine centralized, print server, ... - but how am I supposed to recommend this to a customer when Apple does not have any kind of HA ensurance (dual power supply, remote management, auto power on after AC loss, proper SNMP support, Wake On LAN), a way to attach more than 4 disks (or a real RAID, not a software one like CoreStorage does, and they cut out RAID management of diskutil anyway) or actually hardware that I can mount in a rack without wasting immense amounts of (expensive) space? For the small-business scale, Microsoft actually has the SBS Server licenses, which are not tied to any specific vendor and are exactly the same tools used at big companies so a company can hire any competent consultant/admin for management. Hell, they could simply ask Dell, HP or whomever to sell a specific server as "macOS Server compatible", charge a bit of money for the OS and that's it - people would rush to buy it, and if only to run a CI/CD environment for mobile app building without having to run it on non-DC-grade hardware!
        astrodust 9y ago
        There's still a market, but Apple's not interested in being a bit player in it. HP, Dell, and SuperMicro utterly own the server space. Taking those companies head-on with a single one-size-fits-all server is never going to work, and Apple wasn't prepared to build out a complete server line. The "Server" software they have is for small businesses and is pretty good for 10-20 users, but beyond that you'd probably use Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange or something more serious. It's a nice thing to have, but it can't compete at an enterprise level.
  - rootbear 9y ago
    Both Cray and SGI (now HPE) are both still very much in the game. Their systems all run Linux.
    - astrodust 9y ago
      I mean with their respective UNIX-like operating systems. There was a time when you'd find server rooms with a mix of AIX, HPUX, IRIX, SunOS, VMS, A/UX, and Netware and that was considered normal. In an academic environment you'd have someone running Plan9 or BSD some other quirky thing as well just because. Then Windows and Linux came along and started to kill off this diversity one system at a time.
reducesuffering 9y ago
FreeBSD? Netflix runs it on their OpenConnect boxes, but that's about the extent of my knowledge.
pera 9y ago
A few years ago I remember some of them were running BSD derivatives.
b3lvedere 9y ago
Depends on what you want to do with it. Basically anything else that operates on their hardware infrastructure is ok. Though it may be very challenging to get a useful supercomputer on very old operating systems. I'm guessing one of the major factors to decide for Linux is this: "The licensing cost of a custom, self-supported Linux distribution is the same, whether you're using 20 nodes or 20-million nodes."
IncRnd 9y ago
The Cray I used to program used an OS called Unicos, which was a variant of Unix.
PeachPlum 9y ago
Blue Gene runs Plan 9 and Inferno
fencepost 9y ago
They could likely run any of the BSD variants. Some form of commercial RTOS might also be viable. Even Minix might be an option (hire away some of those Intel folks!) though I'm not sure of its hardware support. That said, why bother? Linux is customizable enough to strip out almost everything extraneous for nodes and has the largest pool of experienced developers, and it's unlikely that any of the other options would have any performance advantage - and less likely that they could keep any performance advantage once it was identified.
- caf 9y ago
  Why on earth would you want a RTOS for HPC? RT is all about privileging latency over throughput, whereas in HPC throughput is everything.
  - fencepost 9y ago
    It's unlikely that you would, but once you make it through Linux, the BSDs (including macOS), Unix systems (legacy?), Windows and Minix there's just not that much else left that's modern. At least with a RTOS or something designed for embedded systems you have some hope that it's designed to be lightweight.
  - dTal 9y ago
    Perhaps because a lot of tasks are not embarassingly parallel, which means moving data around, which means network interconnects, which means latency matters. Every millisecond delay in forwarding a packet is thousands of instructions stalled. I'm not saying this is actually a sensible tradeoff for any extant HPC architecture, but it could be. You certainly want the 'OS' that runs the pipeline on your CPU to be real time!
    - jamiesonbecker 9y ago
      True, a lot of tasks are not embarrassingly parallel, as you point out, but most tasks that run on supercomputers are embarassingly parallel. That's why those supercomputers have value in that problem domain in the first place.
ghaff 9y ago
In recent history, a fair bit of AIX on IBM Power. Further back, lots of other Unix variants and other vendor-specific OSs.
martinpw 9y ago
If you go here: https://www.top500.org/statistics/overtime/ https://www.top500.org/statistics/overtime/ Then select "Operating System" and submit, you can see the OSs that used to be run on systems over the past 10 years.
- rootbear 9y ago
  Nice chart! The speed with which Linux supplanted proprietary Unix systems is remarkable. It would be interesting to know what version of Linux is used most often on current supercomputers. The supercomputer here at Goddard runs SLES (Suse) and I believe other NASA supercomputers run that as well.

NetBSD because "Of course it runs NetBSD" :)

wmf 9y ago

IIRC at one point Microsoft paid one of them to run Windows and years ago there was one running OS X. Decades ago during the Unix Wars there used to be proprietary HPC OSes.

astrodust 9y ago
When Cray and SGI were still in the game there was a lot more operating system diversity. Apple's Xserve cluster was an interesting experiment but it never really went anywhere.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > Apple's Xserve cluster was an interesting experiment but it never really went anywhere. A pity Apple does not manufacture real servers any more. With the old cheesegrater-mac-pros, which were the last thing available after the Xserve death, you at least have the option to put in 4 disks and do a RAID setup, but no remote power/console management or a serial port...
  - astrodust 9y ago
    They've acknowledged the "trash can" design was a mis-step and they're working to correct it, so there's that. Competing in the server market was very difficult for Apple, their needs are often radically different from consumer or even "pro"-consumer. They realized the couldn't "win" at servers, so backing out was the best bet for them.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      > They realized the couldn't "win" at servers, so backing out was the best bet for them. The need for servers is there, or otherwise the "macOS Server" would not be in the App Store. It actually is really nice, it provides everything needed for a business: LDAP, file server, mail, calendar, webserver, TimeMachine centralized, print server, ... - but how am I supposed to recommend this to a customer when Apple does not have any kind of HA ensurance (dual power supply, remote management, auto power on after AC loss, proper SNMP support, Wake On LAN), a way to attach more than 4 disks (or a real RAID, not a software one like CoreStorage does, and they cut out RAID management of diskutil anyway) or actually hardware that I can mount in a rack without wasting immense amounts of (expensive) space? For the small-business scale, Microsoft actually has the SBS Server licenses, which are not tied to any specific vendor and are exactly the same tools used at big companies so a company can hire any competent consultant/admin for management. Hell, they could simply ask Dell, HP or whomever to sell a specific server as "macOS Server compatible", charge a bit of money for the OS and that's it - people would rush to buy it, and if only to run a CI/CD environment for mobile app building without having to run it on non-DC-grade hardware!
      - astrodust 9y ago
        There's still a market, but Apple's not interested in being a bit player in it. HP, Dell, and SuperMicro utterly own the server space. Taking those companies head-on with a single one-size-fits-all server is never going to work, and Apple wasn't prepared to build out a complete server line. The "Server" software they have is for small businesses and is pretty good for 10-20 users, but beyond that you'd probably use Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange or something more serious. It's a nice thing to have, but it can't compete at an enterprise level.
- rootbear 9y ago
  Both Cray and SGI (now HPE) are both still very much in the game. Their systems all run Linux.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    I mean with their respective UNIX-like operating systems. There was a time when you'd find server rooms with a mix of AIX, HPUX, IRIX, SunOS, VMS, A/UX, and Netware and that was considered normal. In an academic environment you'd have someone running Plan9 or BSD some other quirky thing as well just because. Then Windows and Linux came along and started to kill off this diversity one system at a time.

reducesuffering 9y ago

FreeBSD? Netflix runs it on their OpenConnect boxes, but that's about the extent of my knowledge.

pera 9y ago

A few years ago I remember some of them were running BSD derivatives.

b3lvedere 9y ago

Depends on what you want to do with it. Basically anything else that operates on their hardware infrastructure is ok. Though it may be very challenging to get a useful supercomputer on very old operating systems. I'm guessing one of the major factors to decide for Linux is this: "The licensing cost of a custom, self-supported Linux distribution is the same, whether you're using 20 nodes or 20-million nodes."

IncRnd 9y ago

The Cray I used to program used an OS called Unicos, which was a variant of Unix.

PeachPlum 9y ago

Blue Gene runs Plan 9 and Inferno

fencepost 9y ago

They could likely run any of the BSD variants. Some form of commercial RTOS might also be viable. Even Minix might be an option (hire away some of those Intel folks!) though I'm not sure of its hardware support. That said, why bother? Linux is customizable enough to strip out almost everything extraneous for nodes and has the largest pool of experienced developers, and it's unlikely that any of the other options would have any performance advantage - and less likely that they could keep any performance advantage once it was identified.

caf 9y ago
Why on earth would you want a RTOS for HPC? RT is all about privileging latency over throughput, whereas in HPC throughput is everything.
- fencepost 9y ago
  It's unlikely that you would, but once you make it through Linux, the BSDs (including macOS), Unix systems (legacy?), Windows and Minix there's just not that much else left that's modern. At least with a RTOS or something designed for embedded systems you have some hope that it's designed to be lightweight.
- dTal 9y ago
  Perhaps because a lot of tasks are not embarassingly parallel, which means moving data around, which means network interconnects, which means latency matters. Every millisecond delay in forwarding a packet is thousands of instructions stalled. I'm not saying this is actually a sensible tradeoff for any extant HPC architecture, but it could be. You certainly want the 'OS' that runs the pipeline on your CPU to be real time!
  - jamiesonbecker 9y ago
    True, a lot of tasks are not embarrassingly parallel, as you point out, but most tasks that run on supercomputers are embarassingly parallel. That's why those supercomputers have value in that problem domain in the first place.

ghaff 9y ago

In recent history, a fair bit of AIX on IBM Power. Further back, lots of other Unix variants and other vendor-specific OSs.

martinpw 9y ago

If you go here: https://www.top500.org/statistics/overtime/ https://www.top500.org/statistics/overtime/ Then select "Operating System" and submit, you can see the OSs that used to be run on systems over the past 10 years.

rootbear 9y ago
Nice chart! The speed with which Linux supplanted proprietary Unix systems is remarkable. It would be interesting to know what version of Linux is used most often on current supercomputers. The supercomputer here at Goddard runs SLES (Suse) and I believe other NASA supercomputers run that as well.