Beowulf-style supercomputers built out of over-the-counter (OTC) hardware are an economical and practical alternative to expensive, proprietary hardware. Beowulf-like clusters maximize floating point cycles per dollar spent, and small "hobby-scale" beowulfs (less than perhaps eight nodes, where, for the purposes of this article, a node refers to a single case that might house one or more CPUs) can be built almost anywhere and can be managed by anyone with a decent knowledge of Linux or Unix. [As an example, the author has a complete hobby-scale cluster in his home.]

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