Linux has been so heavily utilized in the HPC and scientific computing community that it has become the standard in many areas of academic and scientific research, particularly those requiring HPC. There have been over 40 years of development in Unix and Linux, with many academic, scientific, and system tools. In fact, as of November 2017, all of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world run Linux!

Linux has four essential properties which make it an excellent operating system for the science community:

• Performance – Performance of the operating system can be optimized for specific tasks such as running small portable devices or large supercomputers.
• Functionality – A number of community-driven scientific applications and libraries have been developed under Linux such as molecular dynamics, linear algebra, and fast-Fourier transforms.
• Flexibility – The system is flexible enough to allow users to build applications with a wide array of support tools such as compilers, scientific libraries, debuggers, and network monitors.
• Portability – The operating system, utilities, and libraries have been ported to a wide variety of devices including desktops, clusters, supercomputers, mainframes, embedded systems, and smart phones.