[Beowulf] Linux cluster for my college

[Mitchell Wisidagamage]

> 
> You might want to start with one of the "liveCD" styles of distros...
> 
I'm playing around with a liveCD cluster these days (BCCD to be 
specific) along with VMWare. LiveCD clusters have auto discovery of 
nodes and extremely compact and fast (since they run on memory) and can 
set-up a cluster in minutes.

For what sort of applications are they used for? Due to the fact that 
machines need to be configured (authentication,mount filesystems,install 
libs..etc) each time they are booted they seem to be very 
"inconvenient?" and have limited scope in the real world.

Regards,
  Mitchell