What if Nvidia provided good ⋆BSD drivers? According to the answers from Greg Lindahl and Eugene Miya on Quora to the question "Why is the OS landscape of Supercomputers dominated by Linux instead of BSD?" [1] the Linux dominance is largely an historical oddity rather than due to some inherent superiority of Linux.

If for some reason supercomputer builders could no longer use the best GPUs in supercomputers, would they stick with Linux or would they follow the hardware and switch to a ⋆BSD on the compute nodes?

[1] http://qr.ae/RUortF

>If for some reason supercomputer builders could no longer use the best GPUs in supercomputers, would they stick with Linux or would they follow the hardware and switch to a ⋆BSD on the compute nodes?

I have no idea what the answer would be, but my guess is it would hinge on 1) AMDs reaction, and the performance hit (if any) of switching to AMD GPUs on Linux and 2) the performance hit (if any) of switching the OS to *BSD

NVIDIA does produces drivers for FreeBSD[1]. I don't know if they're considered "good" or not, but they definitely aim to have the same features and quality as on Linux.

[1] http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

I think you vastly underestimate how far those guys would go to eek out every last bit of practical performance.

Going with second rate option simply doesnt work when you're spending hundreds of millions per machine on the high end.

I mean do you really think it told really be easier to port a thousand heavily optimized applications/libs CUDA to OpenCL than the handfull of librsties that dont alrady work with BSD from Linux?!