[Beowulf] Digital Image Processing via HPC/Cluster/Beowulf - Basics

[CJ O'Reilly]

Hello, I hope that this is a suitable place to ask this, if not, I would
equally appreciate some advice on where to look in lue of answers to my
questions:
You may guess that I'm very new to this subject.

I am currently researching the feasibility and process of establishing a
relatively small HPC cluster to speed up the processing of large amounts of
digital images.

After looking at a few HPC computing software solutions listed on the
Wikipedia comparison of cluster software page (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cluster_software ) I still have
only a rough understanding of how the whole system works.

I have a few questions:
1. Do programs you wish to use via HPC platforms need to be written to
support HPC, and further, to support specific middleware using parallel
programming or something like that?
OR
Can you run any program on top of the HPC cluster and have it's workload
effectively distributed? --> How can this be done?
2. For something like digital image processing, where a huge amount of
relatively large images (14MB each) are being processed, will network
speed, or processing power be more of a limiting factor? Or would a gigabit
network suffice?
3. For a relatively easy HPC platform what would you recommend?

Again, I hope this is an ok place to ask such a question, if not please
help refer me to a more suitable source.
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