Supercomputers were not clusters like we have today until the mid-90's. In the first written description of how to build a Beowulf cluster, by Radajewski and E

Supercomputers were not clusters like we have today until the mid-90's. In the first written description of how to build a Beowulf cluster, by Radajewski and Eadline in 1998 [1], the management node was refered to as the "server node" and the compute nodes as "client nodes". I believe the term "compute node" was first used in the context of the Intel ASCI Red supercomputer that was installed at Sandia in 1997. This later led to the Cray XT3, XT4, XT5 families of machines that used the same terminology. But I believe the term was not in generic usage outside of those specific supercomputers until around 2005-2010. [1] https://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/archive/Beowulf-HOWTO.html#ss2.2 https://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/archive/Beowulf-HOW...