This paper discusses Beowulf systems, focusing on Hyglac, the Beowulf system installed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The purpose of the paper is to assess how a system of this type will perform while running a variety of scientific and engineering analysis and design software. The first part of the assessment contains a measurement of the communication performance of Hyglac, along with a discussion of factors which have the potential to limit system performance. The second part consists of performance measurements of six specific programs (analysis and design software), as well as discussion about these measurements. Finally, the measurements and discussion lead to the conclusion that Hyglac is suitable for running these types of codes (in a research/industrial environment such as at JPL) and that the primary factor for determining how a given code will perform is the code's ratio of communication to computation.