Supercomputers
Linux is the most popular operating system among supercomputers due to its superior performance, flexibility, speed and lower costs. In November 2008 Linux held an 87.8 percent share of the world's top 500 supercomputers.
As of June 2010 the operating systems used on the world's top 500 supercomputers were:
| OS | Share |
|---|---|
| Linux | 91.0% |
| Unix | 4.4% |
| Hybrid Unix/Linux | 3.4% |
| Windows HPC | 1.0% |
| BSD | 0.2% |
In January 2010 Weiwu Hu, chief architect of the Loongson family of CPUs at the Institute of Computing Technology, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, confirmed that the new Dawning 6000 supercomputer will use Chinese-made Loongson processors and will run Linux as its operating system. The most recent supercomputer the organization built, the Dawning 5000a, which was first run in 2008, used AMD chips and ran Windows HPC Server 2008.
Read more about this topic: Linux Adoption, Types of Hardware Platforms