text: whats a beowolf cluster?   beowulf clusters are scalable performance clusters based on commodity hardware, on a private system network, with open source software (linux) infrastructure. the designer can improve performance proportionally with added machines. the commodity hardware can be any of a number of mass-market, stand-alone compute nodes as simple as two networked computers each running linux and sharing a file system or as complex as 1024 nodes with a high-speed, low-latency network.