Okay, what should Beowulf's creators have done? Where could they have gotten a closed operating system for free to freely hack into being able to run a supercomputer?
Maybe they could have begged Microsoft to give them all the soucce code for the then newly-released NT 3.1 with freedom to modify it at will, with a promise from Microsoft to extend that free license to other institutions that wanted to do a Beowulf. Now that's getting pretty rediculous.
They should have went to IBM or Sun or Cray, who someone similar who had the most expertise in such things. Do you really think Cray wouldn't have jumped through their shorts to help NASA modify UNICOS? All it would have taken is contract dollars. Now instead, we have Cray on the verge of bankruptcy, and releasing products called "Red Storm" just to try to keep up with the free copies.