Only Two Windows Supercomputers in the Top500 List

Microsoft has been pushing its HPC agenda for quite some time, most recently with the release of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 in 2010. Nonetheless, there are still not many supercomputers in the Top500 list.

This news has somewhat flown under the radar, but it is interesting to note that the share of Windows supercomputers in the latest Top500 list is negligible. Granted, not all of the world’s fastest supercomputers are registered for the Top500 list, but it is remarkable that there are only two Windows supercomputers on the list.

Even more surprising may be that the faster of the two systems is a China-based system at #94, which runs Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. The sustained performance is about 181 TFlops achieved with 30,720 Opteron 1.9 GHz cores. The second system is Australia's CSIRO GPU Cluster with 115 TFlops sustained performance. Both are far behind the fastest supercomputers that are now closing in to 20 PFlops.

Linux.com found that 462 systems are running Linux, while there were 24 Unix systems, 11 mixed OS systems and one BSD system. The obvious conclusion is that Linux is dominating the supercomputer world.

According to Linux.com, “Linux has performed so well in this space because it's able to quickly evolve with the latest system design. Academia embraces Linux because it is easier to prototype and there are no restrictions on publishing the source code in a paper, so for the system designers, it makes sense to work in the same environment as the researchers.”

For Microsoft, there seems to be room for improvement if HPC is still part of the OS strategy. Even if Windows HPC server gets deployed in systems that are not mentioned in this list, the Top500 ranking can easily be exploited for marketing purposes that could help promote the flagship Windows Server product.