NewsForge | How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers?

"IBM and the United States stole the top slot last November when the BlueGene/L system running Linux topped 70 teraflops (trillions of calculations) per second on the Linpack Benchmark and displaced Japan's Earth Simulator as king of ultra high performance computing (HPC). The Earth Simulator runs a customized flavor of Unix, and is capable of 35.86 teraflops. Since taking the lead, IBM has cemented its position by nearly doubling the performance of BlueGene/L, which kept the top spot on the June 2005 Top 500 list with a Linpack performance of 136.8 teraflops."

In related news a special team of Microsoft researchers have managed to couple 500 Intel PCs to acheive an astonishing 75 Blue Screens of Death per second, while at the same time, collecting samples of every known computer virus from an open connection to the Internet. Researchers stated that the main slow-down was waiting for the systems to reboot for the next knock-out, but the faster boot times of Windows Vista will allow them to zoom past this record. "Anybody who thinks that inovation is dead at Microsoft just isn't paying attention" said one of the researchers. Microsoft scientists have dubbed the combined system Black and Blue.