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.

A few weeks ago, the top500 Supercomputer list came out, as it does each November. As expected, Linux is still the most used OS for supercomputing, as it has been since taking the list by storm in the early 2000s.

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.

Today’s release of the list of the top 500 supercomputers shows that well over 90% are running Linux. Also, IBM’s Roadrunner has finally been dethroned; in a big way

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.

Linux runs a massive 91% of supercomputers in June 2010. Windows on the contrary runs a sad 1%.

The TOP500 project was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems is assembled and released.

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.

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.