Forbes: The homegrown Linux operating system has come a long way from its origins as a college kid's pet project and computer hobbyist favorite. Refined in recent years by professional computer programmers at IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Novell and Red Hat, Linux now has become so technically powerful that it lays claim to a prestigious title--it runs more of the world's top supercomputers than any other operating system.

A group that keeps track of the top 500 supercomputers in the world estimates that Linux powers 60% of those machines, displacing Unix, which used to be the most popular operating system for high-performance computing.

The official Top 500 list, available at www.top500.org, does not contain operating system statistics. But the scientists who maintain the list privately keep track of what operating systems are running on the computers, says Hans Werner Meuer, a computer science professor at the University of Mannheim, in Germany, who has been publishing the Top 500 list twice a year since 1993.

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