new list member has few questions.

[Aram Kim]

Hi, guys!  I just started learning about the beowulf systems, and I had
few questions related to the subject.

1. Do softwares have to be written to take the advantage of the system
in order to see improvement?  For instance, if I were to run a program
that just does a really high number of loops, would it run any faster?

2. What would be the disadvantage of using nodes that have different
computer processors?  My roommate and I are planning to make a small
cluster just to learn about the system and we're going to start with
just two nodes, a pentium pro at 200Mhz and a pentium 3 at 500Mhz.  We
might add a 486, just for fun.

3. If a big corporation running windows OS's(2k, NT, 98) on their
computers and wanted to use those computers as beowulf clusters at
night, how hard would that be to implement?  I would assume that
harddrive partitioning and linux installation would be quite difficult
to do on top of the pre-existing operation system environment on every
single computer.  Could it be possible to automate this process?
 
Yours Truly,
Aram Kim