The Top500.org website celebrates 24 years of activity

Nov 15, 2017 10:28 GMT  ·  By

Believe it or not, Linux is dominating all of world's top 500 supercomputers as of November 2017, according to the Top500.org website, which maintains an up-to-date list of these supercomputers.

This year marks the 24th anniversary of Top500 (www.top500.org), the website that compiles and releases a list with up-to-date information on world's top 500 supercomputers. The list is released every June and November, and it became the standard for measuring high-performance computing (HPC).

And this November, however, something amazing happened, but somehow expected. According to the Top500's November list, it looks like all of the top 500 supercomputers are running a Linux-based operating system. In other words, Linux dominates all 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers, and that's a great accomplishment.

Linux dominates the world's top 10 supercomputers since 1998

According to some statistics put together by the Linux Foundation a while ago, it would appear that Linux dominates the world's top 10 supercomputers since 1998, the year when Linux first appeared as a supported operating system in the Top500 list. Since then, more and more supercomputers adopted Linux as the main OS.

"Twice a year, the Linux community takes great pride in tallying the number of Linux machines on the Top500 list," said Linux Foundation. "After first appearing on the list in 1998, Linux has consistently dominated the top 10 over the past decade and has comprised more than 90 percent of the list since June 2010."

Every year, Linux gains more ground against Microsoft's Windows and Apple's macOS operating systems, the former is known to dominate the desktop computing market. Linux, on the other hand, is known to run on world's most powerful servers, and it's the top choice for cloud providers.

The first Top500 supercomputer list was released back in June 1993, 24 years ago, and we hope to see more of those supercomputers run Linux. Check out November's Top500 list to see which countries dominate the list, and don't hesitate to give Linux a try on your personal computer by checking out the list of more than 1,900 GNU/Linux distributions listed on our website.