Rocks Cluster Distribution

Rocks Cluster Distribution (originally called NPACI Rocks) is a Linux distribution intended for high-performance computing clusters. It was started by National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in 2000 and was initially funded in part by an NSF grant (2000–07) but was funded by the follow-up NSF grant through 2011. Rocks was initially based on the Red Hat Linux distribution, however modern versions of Rocks were based on CentOS, with a modified Anaconda installer that simplifies mass installation onto many computers. Rocks includes many tools (such as MPI) which are not part of CentOS but are integral components that make a group of computers into a cluster.