https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/tolkien-was-right-scholars-conclude-beowulf-likely-the-work-of-single-author/
I believe that this can be interpreted as the existing manuscript being copied by a >=2 node cluster of commodity copyists. If that’s not an early example of the “cluster of commodity computing resources” I don’t know what is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the multiple copyists were used to get shorter wall clock time for the task – It is, after all, almost an EP problem, so you get Order(N) improvement in run time with N copyists. Another interpretation would be more of a HA, than HPC – the second copyist replaced the first when they died/fell ill/crashed/annoyed the Prior. In other news, I note that the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) used the well known (to beowulf list members) “station wagon full of disk drives” approach to high bandwidth, high latency data comm. This technique does have significant history in the VLBI field (station wagon full of digital or analog tapes). The effective data rate from the telescope in Hawaii to MIT was 112 Gbps (700TB of data in 50,400 seconds). https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/04/seeing-a-black-hole-with-half-a-ton-of-hard-drives/ --
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