Linux's DistroWatch site stumbles

Summary: DistroWatch, one of the most popular Linux desktop sites, stumbled over the 4th of July.
 
Perhaps the most popular of all Linux desktop sites, DistroWatch went down over the 4th of July weekend.
 

The popular desktop Linux site, DistroWatch, is currently down.

It appears that DistroWatch went down because of some kind of account issue with its web-hosting provider. This would not be the first, nor last, time an important site went down because of a simple payment problem. The website's last update, a listing for the new version of Scientific Linux, was posted on July 4th.
 
The one thing we know for certain is that DistroWatch's dropping off the net at this point is not because its domain registration has expired. DistroWatch's domain doesn't expire until July 3, 2018.
 
DistroWatch, which tracks all Linux desktop distributions as well as many server and mobile distributions, is a one-stop destination for Linux fans. The site also covers other Unix-related operating systems such as BSD and Solaris.
 
On the site, each distribution is given a chart. These charts present a brief summary of the distro, its history, all its software packages listed in extreme detail, and links to all significant reviews.
 
DistroWatch, which is ranked as the 10,897th most popular website in the world by Alexa, was started in mid-2001 by Ladislav Bodnar. While Bodnar stopped doing major editorial work on the site in 2008, he is still listed as the site's maintainer. DistroWatch's current main writer and editor is Jesse Smith.
 
Bodnar, from the former Czechoslovakia, is a metallurgical engineer and has been a Linux user since 1999. In a 2005 interview, he explained that the idea for DistroWatch came from when he worked for the open source company Linpus Technologies.
 
Bodnar said, "My boss asked me to compile a feature list of all the main distributions on the market so that we can compare them with our own product. This was an easy task, I thought, and started searching the web for the information. To my surprise, I couldn't find any good and up-to-date Linux distribution comparison charts, so I had to do all the work myself by visiting each distribution's website and extracting all the data from their web pages. This took me several days. Once I collected the data, I decided to put them up on a webpage so that those who might need such information can get it easily. The page proved very popular right from the start and I soon found myself flooded with email and suggestions. I registered the distrowatch.com domain shortly after that."
 
I've attempted to reach Bodnar and the DistroWatch management for more details on the site's current state and when we can expect to see it back up. At this point, I have not received a reply.
 
~ Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Read More

Linux dominates supercomputers as never before

Summary: The latest list of the fastest supercomputers in the world is out -- and not only does Linux rule, it's almost eliminated all of its competition.
 
NEW YORK --  For years, Linux has ruled supercomputing. So, it came as no surprise to anyone at the Linux Enterprise End-User Summit near Wall Street that once again the Top500 group found in its latest supercomputer ranking that Linux was the fastest of the fast operating systems.

With 97 percent of the world's fastest supercomputers running Linux, the open-source operating system has eliminated almost all its rivals.

As one Red Hat representative said, "The only thing that would be surprising about Linux being the top dog would be if anything else even came close." He doesn't have any reason to worry.
 
In the latest contest, not only did Linux dominate, but Linux showed that is slowly pushing out all its competitors. In the June 2014 Top 500 supercomputer list, the top open-source operating system set a new high with 485 systems out of the fastest 500 running Linux. In other words 97 percent of the fastest computers in the world are based on Linux.
 
Of the remaining 16, 13 run Unix. They appear to be running IBM AIX since they're all running on IBM Power processors. The fastest of these boxes, the United Kingdom's weather predicting system, ECMWF, ranked 60th in the world.
 
Two Windows boxes squeezed into the list. The best of these, coming in at 294th place, is at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. The remaining supercomputer, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology machine, runs a mix of AIX/Unix and Linux. Solaris and BSD Unix no longer have even a toe-hold in the rankings.
 
The overall performance growth rate of all the systems, however, is at a historical low. For the slowest supercomputer, number 500, performance has "lagged behind historical growth trends for the past five years, a trajectory that now increases by only 55 percent each year. Between 1994 and 2008, however, the annual growth rate for the No. 500 systems’ performance was 90 percent."
 
The hardware vendors are trying to goose supercomputer performance by making faster processors. Intel's forthcoming Xeon Phi many-core chip, codenamed Knight's Landing, is designed to deliver up to three trillion double precision floating point operations per second (3 Teraflops) in a single processor socket. That's three times faster than Intel's current highest performance chip.
 
At the same time, Linux is tackling its own performance bottlenecks. A great deal of the talk at Linux Enterprise End-User Summit has been about how to drastically improve the latency in both storage and network stacks.
 
Why so much emphasis on performance when Linux is already the operating system of choice for anyone wanting the fastest computing? Because research and businesses, especially the stock markets and trading companies, not only want but need even faster computers. To meet this demand for ever more speed, Linux is not resting on its laurels but working hard on going ever faster.

~ Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Read More