There was a NYTimes profile at the time of Kent's efforts, and they IIRC literally got the UC Santa Cruz administration to hand over desktop computers destined to go to various people for a few months to assemble into a cluster. So it was likely a bunch of pentium pros or similar. Not a Beowulf cluster, of course, but whatever clustering software Kent had hand rolled out of C for the purpose.

I feel like this is the one domain where the beowfulf cluster meme is still funny

They weren't using pentium pros, they were using Alpha's because the memory interconnect between a beowulf cluster of pentium pros would be orders of magnitude slower. So likely 'the same, but much slower'.

oh, ha. yeah, that was sort of the root of the joke. companies like Celera, or whoever had the money would write a (large) check for big iron.

smaller organizations were realizing they could get slower computers power pretty cheap, and they could get a whole lot of them. There was a little flurry of activity with flocking algorithms, objective-c had a little renaissance due to swarm computing. probably the most famous and lasting was map-reduce, from alphabet, but they were called google back then.

there were a bunch of clever little tricks, like channel bonded network cards to make multiple cards look like one fast card, so you could double or triple bandwidth.

The beowulf cluster joke was kind of the spirit of the scrappy, make something cool out of junk approach while calling companies like sun, hp, compaq dinosaurs. and it continued for a while with people building stuff like this - https://ncsa30.ncsa.illinois.edu/2003/05/ncsa-creates-sony-p... I think there was some weirdness with export controls of ps2's for this kind of stuff.

I don't remember what pc chip was the new hotness back then, it was a good 20 years ago and my memory is dim.

but that, I think, captures the gist of the meme.

www.clustercompute.com