There are only a few days left to apply. Code for America is looking for developers, designers, researchers, data scientists, and product managers for their 2014 Fellowship. It’s a chance to make a difference with code, design, data, and much more.
This is a short list of my favorite graphical text editors for Linux that can be classified as IDE (integrated development environment). Here, I give the pros and cons of working with the following:
KDE SC 4.11 is due for final release in little over two weeks with several interesting and exciting new features. However, according to Eike Hein, the task manager has received its share of work lately too. Hein says lots of bugs have been squashed and the codebase has been cleaned up, but the end-user may not notice it.
Hein said one of the reasons for rewriting the task manager was so it could keep up with the rest of KDE as it moves towards “the QML era” or Plasma 2. That’s when he said that visual and operational changes were “kept to a minimum,” instead focusing on “a regression-free port, but a leaner and meaner codebase along with QML’s designed-in flexibility.”
Today the Linux Foundation released a short analysis paper on 20 years of data collected by the Top500.org supercomputer list. Released each June and November, the Top500 list has ranked the world’s fastest supercomputers since 1993.
The Linux community has delighted in watching Linux become the dominant OS running on Top500 machines over the past decade. And there has been no shortage of stories chronicling the rise of Linux in supercomputing. But we found the data tells another, less obvious story as well.
RMax, the measure by which computing power is ranked on the Top500, has grown steadily over the past 20 years with advances in hardware and system architecture starting at gigaflop/second in 1993, and increasing by a factor of three to petflop/second in 2013. But when the sum of RMax for each year is broken out by operating system over this same time period, it shows a meteoric rise of Linux as a percent of total computing power, starting in the mid 2000’s.
As the paper explains in more detail, Unix dominated the Top500 when high performance computing systems were essentially ever-growing piles of homogenous processors. But as systems evolved to the complex hybrid technologies we see today, Linux took over as the dominant operating system. Why?
While the silicon itself is primarily responsible for the rise of RMax, it was the flexible, low-cost, open source Linux operating system that let researchers experiment with groundbreaking system designs, without breaking the bank.
In short, to quote from the paper directly: “Linux is not only responsible for supporting the majority of supercomputers today, but it also was the single driving force behind the disproportionate growth in supercomputing capacity over the past decade.”
We’re talking, here, about computers such as IBM’s Linux-based Roadrunner machine, which broke the Petaflop/s barrier in 2008 and was used to map the neural pathways for vision in the human brain. Or Cray’s Titan supercomputer, the first CPU/GPU hybrid with a 17 Petaflop/s performance, that’s now running climate change scenarios to help avert ecological disaster.
So come November, we’ll no doubt revel again in counting the number of Linux machines on the Top500. But we’ll also feel good knowing that Linux is driving the advancement of supercomputing, and by extension, scientific research and discovery.
Download the full paper, “20 Years of Top500.org Supercomputer Data Links Linux With Advances in Computing Performance,” from LinuxFoundation.org.
