Most of the new technologies from the RH side work on Debian (systemd, SELinux, udev, dbus, PulseAudio) or are now the default. You would get a newer kernel (3.

Most of the new technologies from the RH side work on Debian (systemd, SELinux, udev, dbus, PulseAudio) or are now the default. You would get a newer kernel (3.10 —> 4.4) and software, as well as a larger repository. More importantly, though, there are no corporate sponsors for Debian. Canonical supports Ubuntu, but not Debian. If that matters, you’d need to look elsewhere. Your needs for HPC are probably different from the norm, though, so maybe none of this matters. The biggest thing is that the gap between Red Hat and the rest of the Linux world is closing and every distro is becoming more similar to what you’re used to.