driving technologies

• cheap hardware

  • widely available, very good performance

• easy to port existing applications (UNIX)

• do-it-yourself cluster computing - complete control

  • (almost) anybody can build such a cluster
  • fits well for many academic and research environs.

• computer science education (Linux, parallel prg)

• free/open source software

  • operating systems - Linux, FreeBSD
  • a lot of high-quality parallel sotware out there