[Info-vax] Alpha technology lives on in the Top 500 supercomputers?

[lawrencedo99 at gmail.com]

On Sunday, June 5, 2016 at 6:36:23 PM UTC+12, Paul Sture wrote:
> "An Alpha was back in the Top 500 list, in this millennium?"

I suppose you know that Alpha was only the second architecture that Linux ever ran on. DEC sent an Alpha to Linus Torvalds in about 1994 with a request to port his kernel to it. So Linux went portable at the same time as it went 64-bit.

Compare Windows NT, which was supposed to be a portable OS, but only ever ran on Alpha in TASO mode. NT for PowerPC never quite made it into production, I believe. The only other long-lasting NT port apart from x86 was to IA-64, which limped along for a while, steadily losing feature parity with x86.

Whereas Linux now works on about two dozen different architectures--basically picking up a new one on average for each year of its life. (And you can still get it for Alpha--I know the guy who is doing most of the package builds on Alpha for Debian.)

And Linux completely owns the supercomputer Top 500.