It was started by National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in 2000.

Rocks includes many tools (such as Message Passing Interface (MPI)) which are not part of CentOS but are integral components that make a group of computers into a cluster.

The "Rolls" extend the system by integrating seamlessly and automatically into the management and packaging mechanisms used by base software, greatly simplifying installation and configuration of large numbers of computers.

By October 2010, Rocks was used for academic, government, and commercial organizations, employed in 1,376 clusters, on every continent except Antarctica.

This easy scalability was a major goal in the development of Rocks, both for the researchers involved,[2] and for the NSF: Broader impact mirrors intellectual merit, and specifically lies in Rocks' new capabilities enabling management of very large clusters such as those emerging from the NSF Track 2 program, the ease of configuration of clusters supporting virtualization capabilities and generally the continuing effect of Rocks on installation and use of Linux clusters across NSF communities.