The Beowulf Project web site is http://www.beowulf.org.

The Beowulf Project was started at CESDIS, at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in early 1994. In the summer of 1994 the first Beowulf 16 node cluster was constructed. The project quickly spread to other NASA sites, other R&D labs and to universities around the world. There are about 100 clusters listed on the Beowulf home page and many other unlisted clusters.

At SC2000, Gordon Bell sponsored a $10K Computer challenge.

What do we mean by cost-effective?

• Assume you need to do a lot of computation and need to get it done inexpensively rather than in the shortest time. You also can run more than one job at a time. Note: this is not like weather prediction, where being able to run seven one-day predictions that each take seven days is not very useful. For weather you must exceed a specific minimal speed that will let you predict tomorrow's weather from current conditions.
• Cost model is based on capital expenditure for hardware. A more sophisticated model would include maintenance, electricity, cooling, floorspace, etc.