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These things are great! I built two 16 node clusters at a previous job, took one on tour to our booth at Linux World or Linux Expo, whichever is in San Jose, and got to meet Donald Becker who is the originator of the concept.
BTW there is nothing "new" about Beowulf architecture, people have been building them for 6-7 years.

Notice there is not a disk in each node? The nodes boot the kernel either from floppy or NVRAM, use ARP/RARP to get an IP address, NFS mount their file system, and then boot the rest of the OS including multiprocessing bits like PVM and MPI over NFS (Network File Share, a UNIX RPC protocol)

They are in use all over the place. US DOE has a few, NASA invented it, Oil companies build them for processing geological data, and animation studios use them as rendering farms. They are useful for any algorithm that can be sped up by parallel processing. The PVM and MPI libraries handle the parallel tasking. Interestingly, at night, you could even include unusued Windows 2000 servers into the parallel cluster. The software exists to do so!

Notice there is not a disk in each node? The nodes boot the kernel either from floppy or NVRAM, use ARP/RARP to get an IP address, NFS mount their file system, and then boot the rest of the OS including multiprocessing bits like PVM and MPI over NFS (Network File Share, a UNIX RPC protocol)

No, there is no floppy. I believe the MSI motherboard BIOS can be configured to boot from a network address: I built a system with a different MSI motherboard earlier this year for someone else and noticed it the functionality.