In the last number of “Flash Informatique” at EPFL you can read an article by Vittoria Rezzonico about free software for HPC.
Since the Beowulf revolution, High Performance Computing (HPC) has been taken over not only by clusters built from commodity hardware, but also by free software. Starting from the operating system, up to the specific scientific software, supercomputers (even the most powerful in the world) sport all kind of free software.
Operating systems in the Top500
Read the article (in French) »
You may also be interested in reading an interview with George Lake, who was working in the research group that created the first beowulf cluster.
