Starting at the top, two IBM-built supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, respectively to the bottom -- a Lenovo Xeon-powered box in China -- all of them run Linux.

Linux supports more hardware architectures than any other operating system. In supercomputers, it supports both clusters, such as Summit and Sierra, the most common architecture, and Massively Parallel Processing (MPP), which is used by the number three computer Sunway TaihuLight.

When it comes to high-performance computing (HPC), Intel dominates the TOP500 by providing processing power to 95.6% of all systems included on the list. That said, IBM's POWER powers the fastest supercomputers. One supercomputer works its high-speed magic with Arm processors: Sandia Labs' Astra, an HPE design, which uses over 130-thousand Cavium ThunderX2 cores.

And, what do all these processors run? Linux, of course.
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133 systems of the Top 500 supercomputers are using either accelerator or co-processor setups. Of these most are using Nvidia GPUs. And, once more, it's Linux conducting the hardware in a symphony of speed.

• Why Chefs Collaborate in the Kitchen

  In a large commercial kitchen, for example hotels or cafeterias, chefs collaborate to create the recipes and meals. Sure, there is more than enough work for one person, and tasks are divided into chopping, mixing, cleaning, garnishing; but the recipe is collaboratively created.

  Suppose one chef broke away and created his or her own recipe? How would the kitchen maintain standards, tastes and reputation? Developing software using open source principles follows a similar theory.

  [...]

  Red Hat is the second largest corporate contributor to the Linux kernel. This means Red Hat engineers and support staff are well versed and able to resolve customer issues involving the Linux kernel. Every application container includes part of the Linux distribution and relies on the Linux kernel, which is the center of the Linux Operating System.

• CentOS 8 Status 17-June-2019

  Since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (on 07-May) we've been looking into the tools that we use to build CentOS Linux. We've chosen to use the Koji buildsystem for RPMs, paired with the Module Build Service for modules, delivered through a distribution called Mbox.

  Mbox allows us to run the Koji Hub (the central job orchestrator), and the Module Build Service in an instance of OKD that we maintain specifically for our buildsystem work. We have 2 instances of mbox; one for the primary architectures (x86_64, ppc64le, and aarch64), and one for the secondary architecture (armhfp). OKD lets us run those instances on the same hardware but in separate namespaces. The builder machines are separate from the OKD cluster, and connect back to the individual buildsystems that they're assigned to.

• CentOS 8.0 Is Looking Like It's Still Some Weeks Out

  For those eager to see CentOS 8.0 as the community open-source rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, progress is being made but it looks like the release is still some weeks out.

  There's been the Wiki page detailing the state of affairs for CentOS 8.0. New today is a blog post summing up the current status. Progress is being made both on building the traditional RHEL8 RPM packages as well as the newer modules/streams. Koji is being used to build the RPMs while the Module Build Service with Mbox is handling the modules.

• NVIDIA Brings CUDA to Arm, Enabling New Path to Exascale Supercomputing

  International Supercomputing Conference -- NVIDIA today announced its support for Arm CPUs, providing the high performance computing industry a new path to build extremely energy-efficient, AI-enabled exascale supercomputers.

• NVIDIA Delivering CUDA To Linux On Arm For HPC/Servers

  NVIDIA announced this morning for ISC 2019 that they are bringing CUDA to Arm beyond their work already for supporting GPU computing with lower-power Tegra SoCs.

• Nvidia pushes ARM supercomputing

  Graphics chip maker Nvidia is best known for consumer computing, vying with AMD's Radeon line for framerates and eye candy. But the venerable giant hasn't ignored the rise of GPU-powered applications that have little or nothing to do with gaming. In the early 2000s, UNC researcher Mark Harris began work popularizing the term "GPGPU," referencing the use of Graphics Processing Units for non-graphics-related tasks. But most of us didn't really become aware of the non-graphics-related possibilities until GPU-powered bitcoin-mining code was released in 2010, and shortly thereafter, strange boxes packed nearly solid with high-end gaming cards started popping up everywhere.

• At ISC: DDN Launches EXA5 for AI, Big Data, HPC Workloads

• IBM Makes Takes Another Big Step To Hybrid Computing

  Today, IBM announced the ability to leverage its unique turnkey operating environment, IBM i, and its AIX UNIX operating systems on IBM Cloud. Both OSs debuted in the 1980s and have a long history with many IBM customers. In addition, IBM i remains one of the most automated, fully integrated, and low-maintenance operating environments. Extending both OSs to IBM Cloud will allow customers to expand their resources on-demand, to migrate to the cloud, to leverage the latest Power9 servers, and to leverage IBM’s extensive resources. IBM is rolling out the service first in North America for customers using IBM i or AIX on Power servers. In conjunction with the extension of the hybrid cloud platform, IBM also announced a program to validate business partners with Power Systems expertise.

The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team. If you would like to reach the server team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-server channel on Freenode. Alternatively, you can sign up and use the Ubuntu Server Team mailing list or visit the Ubuntu Server discourse hub for more discussion.

Also: DragonFlyBSD 5.6 RC1 Released With VM Optimizations, HAMMER2 By Default

• MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 Now Available, Pulumi Announces Pulumi Crosswalk for AWS, KDE Launches Plasma 5.16, IBM Announces Its List of Women Pioneers for AI in Business and Microway Provides Clemson University with an NVIDIA DGX-2 Supercomputer

  MariaDB today announces the release of MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4, "code-named 'Restful Nights' for the peace of mind it brings enterprise customers". The press release notes that this version "is a new, hardened and secured Server (different from MariaDB Community Server aka MariaDB Server) and has never been available before. MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 includes features not available in the community version that are focused on solving enterprise customer needs, providing them with greater reliability, stability and long-term support in production environments."

• MariaDB opens up on locked down Enterprise Server

  MariaDB finally took the wraps off its Enterprise Server product today, which it said was aimed at massive deployments where scale and security are more important than rushing out new features for developers.

  The product was first flagged up back in February, and scheduled to appear in “spring”. We’ll leave it to you to check your calendar and decide whether it hit its deadline.

  “It’s one thing to experiment with open source, to evaluate it,” said MariaDB’s senior director of product marketing Shane Johsnon. “But once you move to the stage where you’re migrating mission critical applications to it, or you’re deploying it at massive scale you encounter new types of challenges, not necessarily functional challenges.”

  So, security in MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 has been boosted, with end-to-end encryption for multi-master clusters. At the same time, the company has clamped down on plugins, with only those deemed tested and production-ready permitted.

  [...]

  MariaDB ES will be GPL, said Johnson, “It’s the community version that gets GA’d with additional QA and additional plugins. The result of that is Enterprise Server.”

• Server Buying Cools, But It's Cool – Don't Panic

  When a market is comprised of hundreds of thousands of customers, things tend to level out and are a lot more predictable than when there are relatively few customers. Before the public clouds took off a decade ago and before the hyperscalers created such large infrastructures to support billions of users running their applications, server buying was a lot smaller and it was also more predictable. Things tended to grow slowly, methodically and they also took time to slow down because not everyone felt an economic decline or a transition to a new system architecture at the same time.

  That is no longer so with the modern server business. Enterprises are offloading some of their compute needs to the public clouds, and in other cases they are employing services provided by the hyperscalers – email, collaboration, and so on – instead of hosting them in their own datacenters. The hyperscalers and cloud builders are at the front of the line ahead of any new server chip generation, and they tend to buy aggressively ahead of the formal launches by Intel and AMD, and if the most recent quarter is any test, they are slowing down server purchases as they await the right time to invest in future chips from those two companies.

• IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

  It would be hard to find a group of enterprise IT shops that are more conservative – meaning averse to risk – than the IBM midrange. Arguably, IBM System z mainframe shops are even more risk averse, but perhaps it is a matter more of scale than degree. In the average IBM i shop, one person – or maybe a handful of people – is keeping risk at bay, while in a mainframe shop there could be dozens or hundreds that are trying to steer the ship without rocking the boat.

  Every now and then, Big Blue publishes an IBM i Strategy And Roadmap document to trying to calm the fears of the IBM i faithful while at the same time trying to fire them up a little. It is a delicate balance, and such documents are generally not full of information. But there are always some things to consider and that can be used to make the ongoing case that the IBM i platform deserves to be preserved in the enterprise and to have continuing investment. So it is with the 2019 edition of the IBM i Strategy And Roadmap, which you can get at this link.