Most of my time last year went into help make this happen, so I’m quite excited to see the results finally announced publicly. In particular I was looking at jitter and working with engineers at SARA.
While linux already has about 90% of the supercomputer market, this is still huge news for linux. There have been a few percent of the market who’ve viewed linux as still not quite ready for prime time. But, as the BlueWaters web site says:
Blue Waters is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world for open scientific research when it comes online in 2011. It will be the first system of its kind to sustain one petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications.
You can’t get a bigger vote of confidence in your OS than that!