The real map of the world’s top 100 supercomputers isn’t nearly as US-centric as my screenshot suggests, but the operating system stats are seriously tilted toward Linux. Over 400 of the top 500 supercomputers in the November 2006 report run some form of the free operating system. Generic “Linux” leads the pack, but Redhat and SuSE are the two most named distributions. Non-free operating systems include IBM’s AIX, HP-UX, and MacOS X.
The best part of the whole site, however, is in the footer, where a random quote appears with each page load. The best of them come from Seymour Cray, who it turns out was much more colorful than I realized. Example: speaking on RAM and virtual memory:
Memory is like an orgasm. It’s a lot better if you don’t have to fake it.
Go Seymour.