Linux Magazine: Why Linux on Clusters?

“Over the past few years, high-performance computing
clusters–tightly- or loosely-coupled collections of low-cost,
off-the-shelf computers–have largely supplanted proprietary
supercomputers. Even with hundreds or even thousands of compute
nodes, a commodity hardware HPC cluster is a fraction of the
expense of the likes of IBM’s Blue Gene or Fujitsu’s RIKEN Super
Combined Cluster.

“At the same time, Linux features have been greatly expanded and
refined. Today, Linux is as capable as any Unix, and because Linux
source code is widely and freely available, Linux has also been
customized to scale up or scale down to virtually any computer
configuration…”

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