All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux

Re:All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running... by dTal on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @07:47PM (#15709404)

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!

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Re:All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running... by caf on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @11:52PM (#15710331)

It is a misconception that RT means "lowest possible latency".

It actually means "latency with a known upper bound". The point of it is to be able to give engineering guarantees - the actuators on the rocket engine vanes will move within N milliseconds of the input voltage from the gyroscope module changing; the robot arm motor will be de-energised within N milliseconds of the laser perimeter sensor activating.

Bounding the worst case can often mean making trade-offs in the best case, and that doesn't make sense in HPC because the hard upper bound just isn't necessary in this environment.

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Re:All 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running... by jamiesonbecker on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @09:30PM (#15709864)

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.

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