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.

Linux claims an even larger portion of the world's top supercomputers and IBM's Roadrunner gets run off its feet by a Jaguar.

When I was a reporter a few years ago, I began covering the fast rise of Linux to dominance on the Top500 Supercomputer list. Since the list comes out every six months, I would end up getting a response like, “Is it that time of year again already?” to which I would respond, yes.

The Windows' fan club likes to point out that Windows is far more popular than Linux. The reason for that has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with monopoly. Nothing shows that better than the semi-annual TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

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.

The fact that GNU/Linux totally dominates the top 500 supercomputing list is hardly news, but the fact that it has managed to *increase* its market share yet further is.

Linux's share of the desktop market grew to 1.13 percent, says Net Applications, making Linux the only OS to improve its position in May. Meanwhile, Linux server share dropped to 20.8 percent, but revenue share grew to 16.8 percent, says IDC, and UC Berkeley's Top500 survey shows Linux running on 91 percent of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.

The U.S. government has hired IBM to build a supercomputer [Sequoia] with more power than all the supercomputers on the Top500 supercomputer list combined. Sequoia will use approximately 1.6 million processing cores, all IBM Power chips, running Linux, which dominates high-performance computing at this scale.

Announced earlier today, the 35th list of the top 500 supercomputers contains few surprises, just that Linux has almost total domination of the list.