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by nl 3140 days ago
This is the correct answer (especially Infiniband - and Aries on Crays)

Also NUMA is very important on supercomputers, and it works well on Linux.

The other thing worth noting is the much better support IBM has for Linux on PowerPC (2 in the top 10). I think Sunway (most powerful in the world) is a Linux shop too.
1 comments
a012 3140 days ago
Is it egg and chicken matter? Vendors don't write driver for BSD and BSDs lack of users because lacks of drivers. Honestly I hope I can run an OpenBSD and install whatever driver for my plugged in devices, both for my personal and production servers.
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tw04 3140 days ago
Vendors do write drivers for bsd, they just don't generally give them back to the project. Agree or disagree, they generally have a ton of time and money invested in their drivers and don't want to give them away to competitors.
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leandrod 3139 days ago
Preciſely why we have copyleft.
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convolvatron 3140 days ago
its very much chicken and egg. Cray used Linux because all the customers were using linux. There was never a technical meeting discussing their relative merits. The Tera MTA project was actually BSD based, because it was from an age where the BSD project had clear technical superiority (and they were probably worried about complying with the GPL)

As others have mentioned there was a Mellanox stack in Free circa 2005 that I worked with. It was used at Isilon (BSD based) in production.

There really isn't a technical discussion here at all, when an overwhelmingly large part of your userbase uses X, it would be pretty stupid to only support Y, and probably not defensible to support X and Y

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loeg 3134 days ago
FreeBSD still does have an Infiniband stack and Isilon still uses it.
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na85 3140 days ago
OpenBSD's performance is atrocious. Scrolling the browser laggy and unresponsive on my ThinkPad x220, and closing tabs sometimes results in multiple-second freezes.

That's maybe good for a router but simply not HPC material.

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rurban 3139 days ago
Nobody wants to use OpenBSD HPC. Everybody wants to use Dragonfly BSD HPC, if not many drivers were missing. Dragonfly MPI outperforms Linux, Linux just has more HW support and a bit better TCP/IP stack.
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