This is called a “Cluster” and it precedes Linux by a decade or two, but yes.
And what else would the supercomputers run on? Windows? You won’t get into the tops if half your computers are bluescreening while the other half is busy updating…
The times when supercomputers were batch-oriented machines where your calculation was the only thing that was running on the hardware, with your software basically including the OS (or at least the parts that you needed) are long over.
Some have thousands but yes.on most of these systems :
Process launch and scheduling is done by a resource manager (SLURM is common)
Inter process communication uses an MPI implementation (like OpenMPI)
These inter node communications uses a low latency (and high bandwidth) network. This is dominated by Infiniband from Nvidia (formerly Mellanox)
What’s really peculiar in modern IT, is that it often use old school Unix multi user management. Users connect to the system through SSH with their own username, use a POSIX filesystem and their processes are executed with their own usernames.
There is kernel knobs to pay attention to, but generally standard RHEL kernels are used.
I think that the software is specialized, but the hardware is not. They use some smart algorithms to distribute computation over huge number of workers.
So is it just hundreds of servers, each running their own OS and coordinating on tasks?
This is called a “Cluster” and it precedes Linux by a decade or two, but yes.
And what else would the supercomputers run on? Windows? You won’t get into the tops if half your computers are bluescreening while the other half is busy updating…
The times when supercomputers were batch-oriented machines where your calculation was the only thing that was running on the hardware, with your software basically including the OS (or at least the parts that you needed) are long over.
Some have thousands but yes.on most of these systems :
What’s really peculiar in modern IT, is that it often use old school Unix multi user management. Users connect to the system through SSH with their own username, use a POSIX filesystem and their processes are executed with their own usernames.
There is kernel knobs to pay attention to, but generally standard RHEL kernels are used.
That’s it!
I think that the software is specialized, but the hardware is not. They use some smart algorithms to distribute computation over huge number of workers.