The article doesn’t do it justice, so I decided to search for it on Wikipedia: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux</a>. Basically it’s just a Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivative that’s consistent across computers to make maintenance useful. It also has a cute set of version names based on atomic number.
I have been to several synchrotrons, central facilities. Most had stock install of centos (whatever stable on that day). All user software was always installed in a nfs mounted /soft/+++
so that everyone could source it and use it. These days many of them are moving to 'xubuntu' (mainly avoiding the unity+gnome3 mess). Many of sci-devs are using ubuntu as their daily driver - so getting the latest python (bio), or math package, is newer in *ubuntu.
I first learned how to operate and administer Linux-based operating systems with Scientific Linux 3 when I helped setup the tier II compute site for the WLCG (called LCG at the time) at my alma mater.<p>SL was, at the time, a thin-ish veneer around RHEL that included some additional packages to make using and installing some very common HEP tools (ROOT, GEANT, etc.) more palatable to academics that didn't have the time nor the fortitude to deal with the nightmares of installing raw RPMs.<p>It was my first foray into the world of linux, and it was both a nightmare and a blessing. I probably owe most of my current career to the hacking I did back then.<p>Much of the usefulness of SL (and most specialty/drivatives of RHEL) have faded over time, but I'll always be thankful for the people that put time and effort into a very thankless job so that HEP physicists around the world could have one less thing to worry about and focus just a bit more time on the science.
To me this looks like a success story: mainstream linux distros have caught up to where SL was, or close enough, so that the marginal benefit of maintaining SL is wearing thin. Maybe they are even surpassing SL in some areas.
Even for scientific uses on Infiniband clusters, we used Rocks (which deploys CentOS or RHEL). There wasn't a compelling advantage to using SL, except the year or two about a decade ago when CentOS was in chaos.
I see SL quite widely used in research computing. People tend to stick to one of its point releases corresponding to RHEL initial releases plus security updates of some sort (e.g. 7.1 round here).