"Cluster computing has made significant progress since its inception in the early 90s. The trend to use PC clusters to achieve supercomputing speed with an affordable budget has accelerated with the rising use of GNU/Linux. The easy availability of inexpensive hardware (processors, memory, hard disks, Ethernet cards) combined with open source software quickly drove people to adopt Linux-based Beowulf Clusters...
"This blurring of terminology raises the question: 'Do people who want to build a cluster have to use Linux?' (Perhaps the heart of that question, and the more practical point, is 'We have bunch of idle PCs using Windows. Do we need to migrate them all into Linux just to borrow their CPU cycles?')..."
