Moores Law has ruled the development of computers for over 50 years (actually it has been officially tracked starting 1958).

The trend is evident in High Performance Computing (HPC) field as shown in this diagram on the right from Top500 website.

Notice that in the period depicted in the diagram from 1994 to 2016, there had been dramatic changes in system architecture of super computers. Hardware evolved from vector computers to Massively Parallel Computing to Clusters and now accelerators. In the mean time, parallel computing tools shifted from PVM to MPI and OpenMP. Popular interconnections changed a few times between propriety connectors and fast switches. This diagram is a vivid testimony that Moores Law is followed through a combined efforts of many things together

Top500 website contains a wealth of statistics on these fast computer systems. Browse the website then answer Questions 1-3 using your knowledge in operating systems (Question 4 requires further reading of extra materials).

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1) What are the most popular operating system among the top 500 supercomputers? What do you think makes it favored by supercomputing community? (10 points)

Performance Development 100 TFlaps 10 Tflops IT Flops 100 GFlops 1 Flops 100 MFlops 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2010 2012 2014 2016