[Beowulf] Some clarification

[William Hopkins]

Hello! I can't seem to find the kind of clarification
I want on Beowulf
clusters, so I'll ask here:

To my understanding, a beowulf cluster is a cluster
designed for
processing power as opposed to redundancy, comprised
of a bunch of
stripped-down workstations running a software that
accepts messages
remotely, so you can write an application that uses
the remote systems'
processors as if it were a simple multi-processor
environment? It
doesn't yield any extra power to existing, non
beowulf-optimized
applications?

Or is there a way to transparently use the remote
processors as if local, thus allowing smart software
like 3d Studio MAX to recognize and automatically use
the extra processing power? Of course with 3dsmax I
could also install the remote client to each network
machine, it supports that, but not all softwares do.

Thanks for your time!

Will