General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Microsoft blames OEMs for slow Windows 8 sales, plans February "relaunch" [View all]Humanist_Activist
(7,670 posts)granted supercomputers nowadays are simply PCs with massive parallel processing in them, think stacks of motherboards, thousands of them. However, up until recently, Windows supported a total of one, single core, CPU. The Server editions have multiple CPU support, and now, with Windows Vista and up(forgot whether XP supports multiple processors), dual and quad core support as well, something Linux had since the mid 90s or so.
Now the server editions of Windows can have up to 64 CPUs and I believe 2TB of RAM, whereas for Linux, it scales to about anywhere from 32 to 512 CPUs, theoretically 4096 CPU support is possible, but only used for testing purposes, and up to 64 TB of physical RAM and 128 TB of Virtual RAM. With the open source kernel, you can modify it for your needs, so technically there is no limit, but for practical purposes there are.
So yes, Windows does run on supercomputers, just not the fastest ones in existence, more on the lower end of the scale.
Note, that for Linux, there is a large amount of source compatibility, regardless of architecture it runs on, with little modification needed, the same cannot be said for Windows.