Linux and Supercomputing: How My Passion for Building COTS Systems Led to an HPC Revolution

David A. Bader described how his passion for building collections of commodity off-the shelf (COTS) systems led to an HPC revolution. His system design took a revolutionary new direction that differed significantly from Beowulf and the HPC research community’s cluster efforts. While Beowulf optimized to minimize cost per megaFLOP and required only free software, his system design maximized performance per price per megaFLOP, and used both mass market commodity components and proprietary software and networks. Beowulf used only Ethernet for the system area network, and David A. Bader engineered the first use of a proprietary scalable network, Myrinet, in a Linux system since communication was a HPC bottleneck.