Are you in need of a machine that can deliver hundreds of trillions of floating-point calculations per second? Or are you in need of a bar story about how the supercomputer in your basement flipped a breaker? Building your own High Performance Compute cluster, a.k.a. supercomputer, is a challenge any expert geek with a weekend of free time and some cash to burn can tackle. Technically speaking, a modern, multi-processor supercomputer is a network of computers working together in parallel to solve a problem. This article will briefly describe each step in the process, focusing on hardware and software.