Clusters use commodity hardware and software components to provide an environment for high performance parallel processing. A major issue in the development of a cluster system is the choice of the operating system that will run on each node. This paper compares three alternatives: Windows NT, Linux, and QNX - a real-time microkernel. The comparison is based on expressive power, performance, and ease-of-use metrics. The result is that none of these systems has a clear advantage over the others in all the metrics, but that each has its strong and weak points. Thus any choice of a base system will involve some technical compromises, but not major ones.
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