I stumbled across this operating system while surfing the web for alternative Open Source clustering apps. It is called Bio-Liinux and has built in research tools and clustering applications. It is built on an Ubuntu base. Here it is: http://nebc.nox.ac.uk/tools/bio-linux
It's probably over the top of what you need. What's cool is that you can download the software, burn the iso. image on to a CD. Since this is a live CD, you can try all the goodies and see if it is right for you without affecting your computer. If you like it, you can install it.