Di era Windows dimana kemudahan pengoperasian alias “user-friendly” menjadi kunci popularitas sistem operasi komputer, tak banyak orang-pada-umumnya yang mengetahui kehadiran Linux, sistem operasi yang dikembangkan Linus Torvalds, hacker asal Finlandia. Dan mungkin akan cukup sulit membuat orang percaya bahwa kedahsyatan Linux dalam kecepatan memproses kalkulasi telah membuatnya “dipercaya” untuk menjadi pendukung utama dalam pengembangan proyek komputer super yang akan melibatkan empat pusat komputerisasi super di Amerika Serikat. Keempat pusat komputer super itu nantinya akan dihubungkan secara paralel dan diharapkan dapat melakukan lebih dari 13 triliun kalkulasi per detik!
In August 2001, BBC reported that the US Government was planning to build what would be a mega computer, capable of performing over 13 trillion calculations per second (13.6 TeraFLOPS). The project, called Tera grid would consist of a connected network of 4 US supercomputing centers. The four labs that are collaborating to create the Teragrid are: National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois(NCSA), San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago; California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. At each of these centers, there would be a supercomputer. In total, there would be more than 3000 processors running in parallel to create the Teragrid. The main technology behind this massive computer would be clustering: the technology of binding together many low performance/cost processors to create a single computing environment.
Dubbed as the Distributed Terascale Facility, the Teragrid will combine enough computing power to facilitate the solution of complex mathematical and simulation problems, ranging from Astronomy and Cancer Research to Weather Forecasting. Equipped with a 600 Terabyte storage space, the Teragrid would be so powerful that it would take a human working on a calculator 10 million years to do what the Teragrid can do in only 1 second. The amazing thing is that this massively parallel Mega Computer will be powered by Linux. Each of the 4 sites will operate a Linux cluster, and connected by means of a 40 Gigabit/sec dedicated optical network.
Dan berbeda dengan Bill Gates (penemu sistem operasi Windows) yang konon membeli DOS (Disk Operating System) seharga $50.000 dari seorang hacker asal Seattle untuk dijadikan “otak” pertama Windows, Linus Torvalds mengembangkan Linux dengan modal hobinya mengutak-atik Minix yang pertama kali dikembangkan Andrew S. Tanenbaum, dengan harapan dapat membuat sistem operasi komputer yang bisa secara bebas digunakan, dimodifikasi, dan didistribusikan.
Baca paparan menarik lainnya tentang sejarah Linux dalam artikel “History of Linux“, yang ditulis oleh Ragib Hasan.
