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Free operating systems that can be used as supercomputing tool

There are many free Unix flavours. They have diferent free licences; but the more common licences are BSD and GPL, completly free. There are slight differences between them on the performance; but they are very similar for a scientist. The more importante diference is on the instalation process, because Linux has the easiest instalation process. The most common free operating systems that can be used for cheap supercomputing are:

• Linux: Under GPL licence, it is the most common free operating system available, and the easier one to install. It has lots of different distributions, each one with its strongness and weakness. It is the best choose for a desk scientific workstation on a cheap computer. More information can be found at http://www.linux.org/.

• Hurd: It is the same system than Linux, but it uses the Hurd kernel, developed by FSF; Linux uses the kernel developed by Linus Torwalds. The Hurd is built on top of CMU's Mach 3.0 kernel and uses Mach's virtual memory management and message-passing facilities. It has a really creative design, so creative that at this time it does not work well. Anyway, It may be an alternative on the future. Linux binaries are not compatible with Hurd ones, but most of them can be recompiled for Hurd. Optimal for research on Computer Science, other uses are discouraged at this moment. It is GPLed. It can be found at http://www.gnu.org.

• FreeBSD: Free flavour of Unix, under BSD licence. It has a faster implementation of TCP/IP stack -with a great diference-. Anyway, it is harder to install. Nearly all the aplications for Linux can be recompiled for FreeBSD. Maybe is the best choose for servers -like SAMBA, NFS or Web servers-. It can be found at http://www.freebsd.org/.

• NetBSD: Free flavour of Unix, under BSD licence. Really mature and stable. It is the free flavour of Unix more portable, thus more ported to more platforms. Currently, it has versions on alpha amiga, arc, arm26, arm32, atari, bebox, cobalt, hp300, hpcmips, i386, luna68k, mac68k, macppc, mipsco, mvme68k, news68k, newsmips, next68k, ofppc, pc532, pmax, prep, sgimips, sh3, sparc, sparc64, sun3, vax, x68k. The best if we want easily port Unix to a strange machine. It can be found at

  http://www.netbsd.org/

• OpenBSD: Free flavour of Unix, under BSD licence. It is, by distance, the most secure operating system that can be found. It is the only operating system which source code has being fully audited. It had three years without a remote hole in the default install, and only one localhost hole in two years in the default install. It supports binary emulation of most programs from SVR4 (Solaris), FreeBSD, Linux, BSD/OS, SunOS and HP-UX. It is the best for machines that can be attacked, as mail servers, DNS servers, NIS servers, firewalls... More information at http://www.openbsd.org/.

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