This is a preservation of work done in about 2004/5 with the CISM project at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Co. The project involved using MPICH in combination with Octave to create parallel processing in a multi-node environment. This allowed the use of parallel processing which can be used with inexpensive computers connected through an ethernet cable and hub. The array of computers to use is expected to be previously set up with NFT running on all nodes and passwordless ssh established on all nodes.
An excellent instruction set for installing an NFS server and MPICH can be found here: https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/mjf5/pi_cluster/src/Building_a_simple_Beowulf_cluster.html
The latest software in setting up MPICH can be found here: https://github.com/pmodels/mpich