Linux Dominates the Top of 500 List

Keeping hold of leading position is the Linux Roadrunner situated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Built in 2008 and belonging to the US Department of Energy, the 1.105 petaflop/s system remains one of the most energy efficient on the list.

In second place, and also belonging to the US Department of Energy, is the 1.059 petaflop/s Cray XT5 Jaguar. The system that uses the Cray Operating System Compute Node Linux can be found at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

New in at 3 is the IBM BlueGene/P system, Jugene, from the Forschungszentrums Juelich, (FZJ) in Germany. The 825 petaflop/s system began official operation in May. Claiming tenth place with 274 petaflop/s is Juropa, also installed at Juelich and together with Jugene, the only non-US systems in the top ten (see gallery for photos of the construction of Juelich's super computer).

Juropa runs with SUSE Linux, Jugene with an IBM developed Compute Node Kernel (CNK), that is described as “Linux-like”. The Linux operating system runs on about 89% of the 500 most powerful computers.