I’ve long followed and blogged about the prominence of Linux in supercomputing and the twice-annual Top500 Supercomputer List. In a relatively short time frame, the open source OS has shot to the top of the Top500 list thanks to its free availability, flexibility, stability, scalability and conduciveness for clustering.

With the biannual list of the top 500 supercomputers the world over released, the following screenshot of a graph showing the operating systems used in those 500 peta-flop crunching machines, and produced by the University of California Berkeley, makes for an impressive visual glance at Linux’s dominance in Super Computing.

Linux infrastructure was heavily used in Avatar's graphics rendering done by digital visual effects company Weta Digital.

Head of Microsoft New Zealand steps down, New Zealand permits software patenting only with the "device" trick, and Ben Sturmfels is working to marginalise software patents also in Australia

One of my favourite sites for anyone benighted enough to believe that Windows is in any sense superior technology to free software is Top500. As its name hints, this is simply the top 500 supercomputers in the world, with an analysis by location, vendors, processor architecture – and, of course, operating systems.

Linux runs a massive 91% of supercomputers in June 2010. Windows on the contrary runs a sad 1%.

The TOP500 project was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems is assembled and released.

Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. According to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the Linux of choice on the world's largest HPC supercomputers today.

Stone's team got "personal supercomputers," compact machines with a stack of graphics processors that together pack quite a punch and can be used to run complex simulations.

Today’s release of the list of the top 500 supercomputers shows that well over 90% are running Linux. Also, IBM’s Roadrunner has finally been dethroned; in a big way