GNU/Linux *Does* Scale – and How

As everyone knows, GNU/Linux grew up as a project to create a completely free alternative to Unix. Key parts were written by Richard Stallman while living the archetypal hacker's life at and around MIT, and by Linus Torvalds – in his bedroom. Against that background, it's no wonder that one of Microsoft's approaches to attacking GNU/Linux has been to dismiss it on technical grounds: after all, such a rag-bag of code written by long-haired hippies and near-teenagers could hardly be compared with the product of decades of serious, top-down planning by some of best coding professionals money can buy, could it?

And thus was born the “Linux does not scale” meme – the idea that, yes, this stuff is free, but you get what you pay for: code that no enterprise could take seriously. Unfortunately for that narrative, GNU/Linux is not only able to scale rather well, but able to do it in perhaps the most demanding of environments – that of supercomputing.

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