What are some good things to do with a beowulf? I've got a decent amount of hardware that was in an old storage container of mine about to be delivered to my house. I collected most of these broken systems over years of helping family and friends and getting to keep what I couldn't fix. I'm considering selling them, but I don't expect to get much and a home cluster would be fun to fuck around with.
The whole cluster would consist of an FX8150 desktop with 8 gigs of RAM and an R9-290x (old gayman system now running Ubuntu), a small AM-1 socket server with a Radeon 5770 running void, an Atom netbook, an AMD Trinity quad core laptop with a broken screen, a Pentium III desktop with an old Nvidia part, a dual core i5 ThinkPad with an Nvidia GPU, an Apple Powerbook G4, a 2011 MacBook pro and some random i3 laptop with integrated graphics.
I enjoy 3d, but I don't have the skills to really need this and that's only one use case and would probably not be needed on a regular basis. Another idea would be citizen science, using the cluster to play around with astronomical data. There's also crypto, but that rarely turns a profit at modern difficulties. How much of a need is there for software testing? That might be interesting on some of this hardware. Any suggestions?