Supercomputer operating system
[3][4] While in a traditional multi-user computer system job scheduling is in effect a tasking problem for processing and peripheral resources, in a massively parallel system, the job management system needs to manage the allocation of both computational and communication resources, as well as gracefully dealing with inevitable hardware failures when tens of thousands of processors are present.
[5] Although most modern supercomputers use the Linux operating system,[6] each manufacturer has made its own specific changes to the Linux distribution they use, and no industry standard exists, partly because the differences in hardware architectures require changes to optimize the operating system to each hardware design.
[1] However, at the same time the size of the code for general purpose operating systems was growing rapidly.
Systems such as Mach at Carnegie Mellon University and ChorusOS at INRIA were examples of early microkernels.
[13] Written in Cybil, a Pascal-like language from Control Data Corporation, EOS highlighted the stability problems in developing stable operating systems for supercomputers and eventually a Unix-like system was offered on the same machine.
[15] The move toward a commodity OS had opponents, who cited the fast pace and focus of Linux development as a major obstacle against adoption.
[17] These variants of Unix included IBM AIX, the open source Linux system, and other adaptations such as UNICOS from Cray.
[17] By the end of the 20th century, Linux was estimated to command the highest share of the supercomputing pie.
[5] It is essential to tune task scheduling, and the operating system, in different configurations of a supercomputer.
[20] On the other hand, IBM's scheduler on the Blue Gene supercomputers aims to exploit locality and minimize network contention by assigning tasks from the same application to one or more midplanes of an 8x8x8 node group.
Slurm is open source, Linux-based, very scalable, and can manage thousands of nodes in a computer cluster with a sustained throughput of over 100,000 jobs per hour.
