If your building a supercomputer, what would your OS of choice be?

Apparently IBM made the choice and oh what a choice it was, this article blew my mind. Read the full article here. Not only is Red Hat Linux making waves in the Enterprise world, they also made their way into the nuclear missile industry as well, tracking safety and reliability of our nations nuclear missile stockpile. IBM was tasked with the job of building a supercomputer that can safely test nuclear missile for their reliability and safety, this was their answer.

IBM built a supercomputer that not only broke the petaflop boundary, but blew it out of the water. IBM created a blazing 1.5 petaflop, which is one thousand trillion calculations per second. Even more amazing it is encased in the IBM Blade Center technology and using AMD processors, 6,948 processors to be exact. As I was reading this article I was asking myself, okay what platform is it running? Red Hat Enterprise Linux of course, this says a lot for Linux in general.

If Linux was not as mature as it has become I would think the platform would have to be some UNIX based system or even some proprietary OS that could manage such an enormous system. So next time you think supercomputer, don’t just think Cray Supercomputer’s, now you can say Linux is managing the fastest current supercomputer in the world and it is managing nuclear missiles which is keeping us safe.