If you talk about desktop, the only name that strikes the mind is Windows, but if you’re looking for some hi-fi performance then the only choice is only Linux.
According to the June’s stats of Top500 regarding world’s fastest supercomputers, 85.4% (427 out of 500)of the world’s fastest computers are Linux by default choice. Windows barely had 1% of the market share.
An important thing to note is that the figure of 85.4% is only for the Linux OS, but if you have a wider look (by including SUSE, Red Hat, CentOS and other similar Linux distributions), you’ll notice that Linux contains over 90% of the total market share. Windows HPC 2008 and Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 have succeeded in maintaining five out of 500 top systems making it 1% of the the total market share.
xCAT distributed computing management and provisioning tool which was created by Egan Ford (IBM’s supercomputer mastermind), is used by the world’s fastest supercomputer that was built by IBM. It is also an open source so it free for all.
