You have got to be kidding me! Just what the hell do you think Free Enterprise is? NASA uses its in-house brain power to help design a supercomputer with commodity hardware; OLD hardware they no longer use; paid for with YOUR tax dollars, and you're giving them $#!t about it!
Making use with what you got is VERY American, and I sure as hell applaud them for it.
BTW: Here's little on beowulf origins.
From the book:
Engineering a Beowulf-style Compute Cluster
Robert G. Brown
Duke University Physics Department
Durham, NC 27708-0305
rgb@phy.duke.edu
Historical Perspective and Religious Homage The concept underlying the beowulf-style compute cluster is not new, and was not invented by any one group at any one time (including the NASA group headed by Sterling and Becker that coined the name ``beowulf''). Rather it was an idea that was developed over a long period and that grew along with a set of open source tools capable of supporting it (primarily PVM at first, and later MPI). Note that this is not an attempt to devalue the contributions of Sterling and Becker in any way, it is simply a fact.
However, Thomas Sterling and Don Becker at NASA-Goddard (CESDIS) were, as far as I know, the first group to conceive of making a dedicated function supercomputer out of commodity components running entirely open source software and Don Becker, especially, has devoted a huge fraction of his life to the development of the open source software drivers required to make such a vision reality. Don actually wrote most of the ethernet device drivers in use in Linux today, which are the sine qua non of any kind of networked parallel computing1.23. The NASA group also made specific modifications to the Linux kernel to support beowulf design (like channel bonding) that are worthy of mention. Most recently Don Becker and Erik Hendricks and others from the original NASA-Goddard beowulf team have formed Scyld.com1.24, which both maintains the beowulf list and beowulf website and has produced a ``true beowulf in a box'' - the Scyld Beowulf CD - that can be used to transform any pile of PC's into a beowulf in literally minutes.
By providing the sexy name, a useful website, and the related mailing list they formed a nucleation point for all the users of PVM and MPI who were tired of programming in parallel on networks of expensive hardware with proprietary and expensive operating systems (like those offered at the time by IBM, DEC, SGI, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard) only to have to buy the whole thing over and over again at very high cost as the hardware evolved. Once Linux had a reasonably reliable network and Intel finally managed to produce a mass-market processor with decent and cost-beneficial numerical performance (the P6), those PVM/MPI users, including myself, rejected those expensive, proprietary systems like radioactive waste and joined with others of a like mind on the beowulf list. This began an open source development/user support cycle that persists and is amazingly effective today.
Why was this technology not privately kept as property of the United States Government? Why was it given away, completely free of charge, to anyone in the world who wanted a copy? What exactly did we receive in return? Nothing much, that I know of.