İs FreeBSD good?

Maturin said:
Are there any supercomputers running FreeBSD?
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No there are not.

If you define "supercomputer" as "on the top500 list", for the last ~9 years (since 2017), all 500 of them have run some flavor of Linux. There has never been a FreeBSD machine on that list. The last one that was "BSD based" (whatever that means) was turned off in 2013.

Maturin said:
If not, why not?
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Because lots of people, companies and organizations invest effort to make Linux run highly efficiently on these machines. There are specialized compilers (Portland Group for example), highly tuned libraries (MPI), fast file systems (Lustre, Ceph, GPFS), and proprietary network interconnects. Not to mention the libraries required these days for GPU/TPU usage.

In a nutshell the answer is: Someone who spends a few M$ on a supercomputer will run whatever makes that machine most productive. They don't have time to experiment with an operating system that is less developed and tuned for that application. The effort required to port and tune/optimize the set of tools described above is a large team (dozens of dedicated people) for many months or a few years.

drhowarddrfine said:
I wonder how many of those decisions are made based on familiarity alone.
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At the M$ to B$ level of investment and spending, these decisions are made very much based on numbers and evidence, not familiarity and emotion.
 
Espionage724 said:
That sounds like a job :p I feel jumping into sysadmin should be fun: I can't imagine asking an online community about an OS before installing; I'd just install it if it sounds cool.
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Sometimes I also like to play around and experiment with things, but for me the definition of a good operating system is a system which allows the user to do boring tasks such as scanning - printing, maintaining spreadsheets, typing letters, creating PDFs, or just basically any sort of mundane work related task. I've been experimenting with FreeBSD for approximately one month, and so far it seems completely capable of doing all of the things I need a computer to do, so I have to say it's a great, but somewhat intimidating operating system.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Well, that's my point about familiarity. Netflix had time to decide FreeBSD was best for their video distribution. They had the time but...I don't know about the others.
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The usual way that that's done is as a pilot project with a subset of the users that are more technically inclined. It's an opportunity to both establish that as well as identify anything that needs to come up during training. But, most of the people actually using computers at work know nothing about anything beyond a handful of programs and the rest is a matter for IT to get up and running. In that respect. systems like FreeBSD that have robust tools for things related to that are often a good choice.

Now whether or not FreeBSD is an acceptable choice is really going to depend on the specifics, much of what I personally have used computers at work for would run just fine on FreeBSD as it's either browser based or just an RDP client of things running on a remote server.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Well, that's my point about familiarity. Netflix had time to decide FreeBSD was best for their video distribution. They had the time but...I don't know about the others.
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And there were good reasons for that decision; the person who made that choice (I know them a little bit, and their former manager is a neighbor of ours, matter of fact I see their house right now through the window) looked at the pro and con. The biggest driver: the content serving machines were individual servers, not clustered, who needed a very stable and "experienced" network stack, and had good support for fast and reliable upgrades, plus a few other characteristics. Since the engineer was knowledgable about BSD and the alternatives, that was their choice, and (IMHO) a fine choice.

But that decision doesn't transfer to other uses, such supercomputers. Very different technology and problems.
 
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