in a beowulf cluster, the application programs never see the computational nodes (also called slave computers) but only interact with the "master" which is a specific computer handling the scheduling and management of the slaves. in a typical implementation the master has two network interfaces, one that communicates with the private beowulf network for the slaves, the other for the general purpose network of the organization. the slave computers typically have their own version of the same operating system, and local memory and disk space. however, the private slave network may also have a large and shared file server that stores global persistent data, accessed by the slaves as needed.