Thanks to Bob
Grabau for this link.
“And a new race was on. Tall racks of interlinked commodity PCs,
some casually named LOBOS for lots of boxes on shelves, grew up in
NASA and Energy Department laboratories as well as at other federal
sites. Researchers could string them together and unhook them as
needed.
“The crucial choice of a Beowulf operating system — freeware
Linux installed on each node — met the federal researchers’ need
for open source code they could modify to fit their experiments.
Coincidentally, it set off an OS revolution of its own.
“Hardware vendors took note of what the users were doing.
Leading makers such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., SGI and Sun
Microsystems A supercluster of Defense Department and federally
funded research sites calling itself the National Technology Grid
already reaches all the way across the United States to the Maui
High-Performance Computing Center in Hawaii. A typical site on the
grid has several hundred Pentium II processors in nodes running
Linux, Microsoft Windows NT or proprietary Unix…”