Cactus originated in the academic research community, where it was developed and used over many years by a large international collaboration of physicists and computational scientists.

The name Cactus comes from the design of a central core (or "flesh") which connects to application modules (or "thorns") through an extensible interface.

Thorns can implement custom developed scientific or engineering applications, such as computational fluid dynamics.

Cactus provides easy access to many cutting-edge software technologies being developed in the academic research community, including the Globus Toolkit, HDF5 parallel file I/O, the PETSc scientific library, adaptive mesh refinement, web interfaces, and advanced visualization tools.

Staff with the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, who were part of the original group at AEI who created Cactus, celebrated the program's 10th birthday in April 2007.