6
Votes
Dec 6, 2009 5:09 PM
9 comments
Quite possibly the biggest computing strawman ever created. The zealots will always fall back to the fact that the world’s top 500 supercomputers run Linux whenever you bring up one of the many flaws in their OS.
Oh, and don’t forget the London Stock Exchange Fiasco™.
This, despite the fact that their precious supercomputers run a heavily modified, often internally altered and thus proprietary, kernel.
Comments
I can haz teh stoxexchangez 2?
There, fixed it.
I sure hope the open source that super computer code. I need it to run my render farm here at home!
I'm in a position to comment on this. (Honestly!)
I co-architected a fraud detection system on Solaris 7 that processed every single Visa transaction in the world.
Surprisingly, it didn't involve Linux. Surprisingly, it did involve gcc (2.95, as I recall) and the SGI version of STL.
It ran at 4000 TPS on a 24-cpu Sparc system. Not good enough for Accenture. They moved in, and insisted that it was ported to Java.
That lasted about a year or so, before middle management noticed that 50% of each cpu was devoted to running the JVM. (This was around Java 1.4 -- I'm told it's more flexible now.)
If you remove Accenture from this story, and replace them with a networked bunch of Commodores, then I firmly believe that they'd do better than bog-standard, outa-da-box, Linux.
Linux Supercomputers running the LSE in 2007-2009: Priceless! There goes around half a trillion pounds down the drain. Not the applications' fault, of course. But it's fast -- really fast!
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is happy to oblige:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/15202/high_energy_linux_linux_the_large_hadron_collider
Complete with SuperComputer™ and StockExchange™
Its like SJVN writes articles to reassure himself that Linux is still relevant or something. Anything to help himself sleep better at night.
and why don't they run Windows?
Wasn't built for the job. They should be using something like BSD, and not Linux.
You'll note SVJN's cretin link to CERN: http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/.
This turns out to be a list of "Recent software updates." None too awesome.
Of course, they're all to do with fast fourier transforms and data-modelling and sophisticated rule-based quantum physics stuff, aren't they?
Nope. Turns out that users of Scientific Linux have the same problems as us humbler types:
* CUPS
* FireFox
* net-snmp (well, I use it)
* glibc
* samba (really? Triffic inter-linux communication protocol, that)
* dhcp
* httpd
... and, my personal favourite:
* [SECURITY][BUGFIX][ENHANCEMENT] SLC4X: Multiple updates including kernel (over 300 packages)
... followed by:
* [SECURITY Important] SLC4X: kernel update
... and, instantly:
* [SECURITY Important] SLC5X: kernel update
Way to go, Scientific Linux! It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine!
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