Of any currently available?.
The fastest operating system is the one that supports your hardware best and
uses least ressources for everything which is not task related. It can be
Linux, but also Windows or anything else...
Seems like when the silly SETI project
using computers to sift radio telescope data was in full swing,
something UNIX called IRIS (think that was the name) and Alpha chips
ran the fastest by a wide margin compared to anything else.
Probably not. IRIX (not IRIS) is the UNIX variant of Silicon Graphics (SGI).
It runs only on SGI hardware with MIPS processors of which even the fastest
incarnations can't keep up with any somewhat newer XEON or Athlon64/Opteron
processors. SGI IRIX and the SGI MIPS-based hardware is basically dead for
some time now (there are a few remaining old systems available for the few
customers with contracts that require this availability), and SGI is
currently settling on Itanium2 and Linux which beats everything they made
running IRIX.
Alpha is also a dead horse. This platform hasn't really been updated for
years now, there are no new systems (except a few available old machines
similarly to SGIs MIPS offers) and it's also facing its end of support
life...
Both Alpha and SGI MIPS have long been overtaken by other architectures in
terms of performance, and this not only in SETI.
SETI@Home is a very floating point intensive application. The currently
strongest platforms for it are Itanium2, Opteron and the new intel XEON 5100
series (Woodcrest)...
Benjamin
