Novell has announced that 6 out of the the world's 10 most powerful supercomputers run an unmodified or modified version of the company's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. According to the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites , which produces the definitive list of the largest supercomputing environments, Linux is powering 9 of the 10 largest supercomputers and approximately 85 per cent of the top 500 - with Novell being the operating system of choice for the world's largest supercomputers.
The largest supercomputer in the latest list is called Jaguar, which is located at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. It was upgraded earlier in 2009 and posted a 1.75 petaflop/s performance running the Linpack benchmark, taking it past the previous leader, Roadrunner, which is at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. Jaguar's theoretical peak capability is 2.3 petaflop/s and consists of nearly a quarter of a million cores.
Other top 10 HPC environments running SLES include the National Institute for Computational Sciences/University of Tennessee (USA), Forschungszentrum Juelich (Germany), and NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Division (USA), amongst others.
Holger Dyroff, vice president for business development, Novell, said: 'Supercomputers are helping to push the boundary of science and knowledge around the world, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell has been chosen as the optimal operating system to power many of these HPC environments for good reasons. Linux has become the HPC operating system of choice, thanks to its scalability and performance capabilities, its similarity to Unix, and the wide variety of open-source software and development tools available.'
