Open Source in HPC
In this blog post, we will cover the many ways open source has influenced the high-performance computing industry and some of the common open-source solutions in HPC.
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The [GNU/]Linux operating system, probably one of the most recognised open-source projects, has been both a driver for open source software in HPC and been driven by HPC use cases. NASA were early users of Linux and Linux, in turn, was fundamental to the first beowulf cluster. Beowulf clusters were essentially clusters created using commodity servers and high speed interconnect, instead of more traditional mainframes or supercomputers. The first such cluster was deployed at NASA, which went on to shape HPC as we know it today. It drove Linux adoption from then onwards in government and expanded well outside that sector into others as well as enterprises.
HPC workload reliance on performance has driven a lot of development efforts in Linux, all focused heavily on driving down latency and increasing performance anywhere from networking to storage.