I wrote last week about the continued strength and appeal of Linux for supercomputers. With this week’s release of the latest list of the Top500 Supercomputers, I wanted to quantify that dominance that is being reported elsewhwere.

It should be mentioned that HPC competition seems to be heating up for sure. Microsoft continues to stretch into the supercomputing realm with its Windows Compute Cluster 2003 and grew from just 0.4% of the top supercomputers in June 2007 to 1.2% in the latest November 2007 list. The software giant is also making deals and announced a new HPC Server 2008. Red Hat, which claims about 2.6% of super systems in the most recent list, is also pushing its HPC profile by partnering with Platform Computing. Novell’s SUSE Linux is prominent on the list and is used in more than 10% of the Top500 systems.

Other operating systems, such as AIX (4.8%), Solaris (0.4%) and Mac OS X (0.4%) make the list, but Linux is alone at the top, where it is used in 459 systems or 91.8% of the top supercomputer systems. It is sometimes paired with other operating systems, such as UNICOS or CNK, but in most cases (more than 80%), Linux is the only OS used. It will be interesting to see what happens in subsequent lists, but as Top500 organizers have said for years, Linux shows no sign of slowing down for the world’s fastest computers.