I managed a research cluster for a university for about 10 years. The hardware was largely commodity and not specialized. Unless you call nVidia GPU’s or InfiniBand “specialized”. Linux was the obvious choice because many cluster-aware applications, both open source and commercial, run on Linux.
We even went so far as to integrate the cluster with CERN’s ATLAS grid to share data and compute power for analyzing ATLAS data from the LHC. Virtually all the other grid clusters ran Linux, so that made it much easier to add our cluster to its distributed environment.
I managed a research cluster for a university for about 10 years. The hardware was largely commodity and not specialized. Unless you call nVidia GPU’s or InfiniBand “specialized”. Linux was the obvious choice because many cluster-aware applications, both open source and commercial, run on Linux.
We even went so far as to integrate the cluster with CERN’s ATLAS grid to share data and compute power for analyzing ATLAS data from the LHC. Virtually all the other grid clusters ran Linux, so that made it much easier to add our cluster to its distributed environment.