• Thaurin@lemmy.world
      7·
      6 days ago

      A supercomputer running Windows HPC Server 2008 actually ranked 23 in TOP500 in June 2008.

      • tate@lemmy.sdf.org
        2·
        6 days ago

        I always forget that Windows Server even exists, because the name is so stupid. “windows” should mean “gui interface to os.”

        edit: fixed redundacy.

          • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            7·
            5 days ago

            I’d say having a GUI is not inherently stupid. The stupid part is, if I understand it correctly, the GUI being a required component and the primary access method.

            • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
              5·
              5 days ago

              Yeah. Thankfully, Windows server cleaned up that stupidity starting around 2006 and finished in around 2018.

              Which all sounds fine until we meditate on the history that basically all other server operating systems have had efficient remote administration solutions since before 1995 (reasonable solutions existed before SSH, even).

              Windows was over 20 years late to adopt non-grapgical low latency (aka sane) options for remote administration.

              I think it’s a big part of the reason Windows doesn’t appear much on this chart.

          • dan@upvote.au
            3·
            5 days ago

            The GUI is optional these days, and there’s plenty of Windows servers that don’t use it. The recommended administration approach these days is PowerShell remoting, often over SSH now that Windows has a native SSH server bundled (based on OpenSSH).

            • yogurtwrong@lemmy.world
              1·
              5 days ago

              That gives me the idea of windows server installed on bare metal configured as a lightweight game runner. (much like a linux distro with minimal wm)

              I’ve seen people dualbooting windows server as an unbloated gaming OS but I’m not sure if running a custom minimal GUI on windows server is possible. You seem knowledgeable on the subject, with enough effort, is it possible?

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    98·
    6 days ago

    So basically, everybody switched from expensive UNIX™ to cheap “unix”-in-all-but-trademark-certification once it became feasible, and otherwise nothing has changed in 30 years.

    • Allero@lemmy.today
      40·
      6 days ago

      Except this time the Unix-like took 100% of the market

      Was too clear this thing is just better

    • Spezi@feddit.org
      62·
      5 days ago

      Those were the basic entry level configurations needed to run Windows Vista with Aero effects.

      • Psythik@lemmy.world
        512·
        5 days ago

        Meh, you just needed a discrete GPU, and not even a good one either. Just a basic, bare-bones card with 128MB of VRAM and pixel shader 2.0 support would have sufficed, but sadly most users didn’t even have that back in 06-08.

        It was mostly the consumer’s fault for buying cheap garbage laptops with trash-tier iGPUs in them, and the manufacturer’s for slapping a “compatible with Vista” sticker on them and pushing those shitboxes on consumers. If you had a half-decent $700-800 PC then, Vista ran like a dream.

        • porl@lemmy.worldEnglish
          19·
          5 days ago

          No, it was mostly the manufacturers fault for implying that their machine would run the operating system it shipped with well. Well that and Microsoft’s fault for strong arming them to push Vista on machines that weren’t going to run it well.

          • Psythik@lemmy.world
            2·
            4 days ago

            APUs obviously weren’t a thing yet, and it was common knowledge back then that contemporary iGPUs were complete and utter trash. I mean they were so weak that you couldn’t even play HD video or even enable some of XP’s very basic graphical effects with most integrated graphics.

            Everyone knew that you needed a dedicated graphics card back then, so you can and should in fact put some blame on the consumer for being dumb enough to buy a PC without one, regardless of what the sticker said. I mean I was a teenager back then and even still I knew better. The blame goes both ways.

            • porl@lemmy.worldEnglish
              31·
              4 days ago

              No, if you weren’t “involved in the scene” and only had the word of the person at the store then you have no idea what an iGPU is, let alone why they weren’t up to the task of running the very thing it was sold with.

              You were a teenager in a time where teenagers average tech knowledge was much higher than before. That is not the same as someone who just learnt they now need one of those computer things for work. Not everyone had someone near them who could explain it to them. Blaming them for not knowing the intricacies of the machines is ridiculous. It was pure greed by Microsoft and the manufacturers.

        • olympicyes@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          5 days ago

          Most computers sold are the lowest end models. At work we never got anything decent so it was always a bit of a struggle. Our office stayed with XP for way longer than we should have so we skipped Vista altogether and adopted Windows 7 a few years late.

          • Grimpen@lemmy.ca
            30·
            6 days ago

            I think it was PS3 that shipped with “Other OS” functionality, and were sold a little cheaper than production costs would indicate, to make it up on games.

            Only thing is, a bunch of institutions discovered you could order a pallet of PS3’s, set up Linux, and have a pretty skookum cluster for cheap.

            I’m pretty sure Sony dropped “Other OS” not because of vague concerns of piracy, but because they were effectively subsidizing supercomputers.

            Don’t know if any of those PS3 clusters made it onto Top500.

            • infeeeee@lemm.ee
              25·
              6 days ago

              It was 33rd in 2010:

              In November 2010, the Air Force Research Laboratory created a powerful supercomputer, nicknamed the “Condor Cluster”, by connecting together 1,760 consoles with 168 GPUs and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of 500 trillion floating-point operations per second (500 TFLOPS). As built, the Condor Cluster was the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world and was used to analyze high definition satellite imagery at a cost of only one tenth that of a traditional supercomputer.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

              https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/playstations.jpg

            • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
              7·
              6 days ago

              Makes me think how PS2 had export restrictions because “its graphics chip is sufficiently powerful to control missiles equipped with terrain reading navigation systems”

              • BCsven@lemmy.ca
                4·
                6 days ago

                Some of thaose restrictions get stupid. We had a client ship us their hardware and they included Laser Mouse on the manifest. The US border controls would not allow delivery due to a Laser being included LOL. Had they just entered it as a Mouse the package would have been delivered.

                • Grimpen@lemmy.ca
                  2·
                  5 days ago

                  I remember when 128 but SSL Encryption was export restricted in the mid 90’s. When I first opened an online banking account, the Bank sent a CD with a customized version of Netscape Navigator with 128 bit SSL, and the bank logo in place of the Netscape N.

      • whaleross@lemmy.world
        10·
        6 days ago

        Apple had its current desktop environment for it’s proprietary ecosystem built on BSD with their own twist while supercomputers are typically multiuser parallel computing beats, so I’d say it is really fucking surprising. Pretty and responsive desktop environments and breathtaking number crunchers are the polar opposites of a product. Fuck me, you’ll find UNIX roots in Windows NT but my flabbers would be ghasted if Deep Blue had dropped a Blue Screen.

  • Z3k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    361·
    6 days ago

    As someone who worked on designing racks in the super computer space about 10 q5vyrs ago I had no clue windows and mac even tried to entered the space

    • gerdesj@lemmy.mlEnglish
      411·
      6 days ago

      about 10 q5vyrs ago

      Have you been distracted and typed a password/PSK in the wrong field 8)

      • Z3k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
        181·
        6 days ago

        Lol typing on phone plus bevy. Can’t defend it beyond that

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
          9·
          6 days ago

          but it did not stick.

          Yeah. It was bad. The job of a Supercomputer is to be really fast and really parallel. Windows for Supercomputing was… not.

          I honestly thought it might make it, considering the engineering talent that Microsoft had.

          But I think time proves that Unix and Linux just had an insurmountable head start. Windows, to the best of my knowledge, never came close to closing the gap.

          • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
            7·
            6 days ago

            At this point I think it’s most telling that even Azure runs on Linux. Microsoft’s twin flagship products somehow still only work well when Linux does the heavy lifting and works as the glue between

            • sep@lemmy.world
              3·
              6 days ago

              Where did you find that azure runs on linux? I have been qurious for a while, but google refuse to tell me anything but the old “a variant of hyper-v” or “linux is 60% of the azure worklad” (not what i asked about!)

              • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
                5·
                4 days ago

                Where did you find that azure runs on linux?

                I dont know of anywhere that Microsoft confirms, officially, that Azure, itself, is largely running on Linux. They share stats about what workloads others are running on it, but not, to my knowledge, about what it is composed of.

                I suppose that would be an oversimplification, anyway.

                But that Azure itself is running mostly on Linux is an open secret among folks who spend time chatting with engineers who have worked on the framework of the Azure cloud.

                When I have chatted with them, Azure cloud engineers have displayed huge amouts of Linux experience while they sometimes needed to “phone a friend” to answer Windows server edition questions.

                For a variety of reasons related to how much longer people have been scaling Linux clusters, than Windows servers, this isn’t particularly shocking.

                Edit: To confirm what others have mentioned, inferring from chatting with MS staff suggests, more specifically, that Azure, itself, is mostly Linux OS running on a Hyper-V virtualization later.

              • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
                3·
                6 days ago

                Good question! I can’t remember.

                I think I read a Microsoft blog or something like a decade ago that said they shifted from a Hyper-V based solution to Linux to improve stability, but honestly it’s been so long I wouldn’t be shocked if I just saw it in a reddit comment on a related article that I didn’t yet have the technical knowhow to fully comprehend and took it as gospel.

          • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
            4·
            6 days ago

            But, surely Windows is the wrong OS?

            Windows is a per-user GUI… supercomputing is all about crunching numbers, isn’t it?

            I can understand M$ trying to get into this market and I know Windows server can be used to run stuff, but again, you don’t need a GUI on each node a supercomputer they’d be better off with DOS…?

            • Badabinski@kbin.earth
              7·
              6 days ago

              I could see the NT kernel being okay in isolation, but the rest of Windows coming along for the ride puts the kibosh on that idea.

            • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
              3·
              3 days ago

              But, surely Windows is the wrong OS?

              Oh yes! To be clear - trying to put any version of Windows on a super-computer is every bit as insane as you might imagine. By what I heard in the rumor mill, it went every bit as badly as anyone might have guessed.

              But I like to root for an underdog, and it was neat to hear about Microsoft engineers trying to take the Windows kernel somewhere it had no rational excuse to run (at the time - and I wonder if they had internal beta versions of stuff that Windows ships standard now, like SSH…), perhaps by sheer force of will and hard work.

      • Z3k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        6 days ago

        Yeh it was system x I worked on out default was redhat. I forget the other options but win and mac sure as shut wasn’t on the list

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
    23·
    6 days ago

    Wow, that’s kind of a lot more Linux than I was expecting, but it also makes sense. Pretty cool tbh.

  • Mwa@lemm.eeEnglish
    181·
    6 days ago

    Maybe windows is not used in supercomputers often because unix and linux is more flexiable for the cpus they use(Power9,Sparc,etc)

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
      6·
      5 days ago

      That’s certainly a big part of it. When one needs to buy a metric crap load of CPUs, one tends to shop outside the popular defaults.

      Another big reason, historically, is that Supercomputers didn’t typically have any kind of non-command-line way to interact with them, and Windows needed it.

      Until PowerShell and Windows 8, there were still substantial configuration options in Windows that were 100% managed by graphical packages. They could be changed by direct file edits and registry editing, but it added a lot of risk. All of the “did I make a mistake” tools were graphical and so unavailable from command line.

      So any version of Windows stripped down enough to run on any super-computer cluster was going to be missing a lot of features, until around 2006.

      Since Linux and Unix started as command line operating systems, both already had plenty fully featured options for Supercomputing.

    • Matt@lemmy.ml
      151·
      5 days ago

      Plus Linux doesn’t limit you in the number of drives, whereas Windows limits you from A to Z. I read it here.

    • superkret@feddit.orgOP
      28·
      6 days ago

      I think you can actually see it in the graph.
      The Condor Cluster with its 500 Teraflops would have been in the Top 500 supercomputers from 2009 till ~2014.
      The PS3 operating system is a BSD, and you can see a thin yellow line in that exact time frame.

    • A7thStone@lemmy.world
      5·
      6 days ago

      Yes, in the linux stat. The otheros option on the early PS3 allowed you to boot linux, which is what most, of not all, of the clusters used.

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
        4·
        6 days ago

        How can there be N/A though? How can any functional computer not have an operating system? Or is just reading the really big MHz number of the CPU count as it being a supercomputer?

        • superkret@feddit.orgOP
          6·
          6 days ago

          Early computers didn’t have operating systems.
          You just plugged in a punch card or tape with the program you want to run and the computer executed those exact instructions and nothing else.
          Those programs were specifically written for that exact hardware (not even for that model, but for that machine).
          To boot up the computer, you had to put a number of switches into the correct position (0 or 1), to bring its registers in the correct state to accept programs.

          So you were the BIOS and bootloader, and there was no need for an OS because the userspace programs told the CPU directly what bits to flip.

        • sep@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 days ago

          They ofcouse had one, probably linux, or unix. But that information, about the cluster, is not available.