homemade supercomputer

So, right now I'm interning at IBM, learning COBOL, hopefully eventually going to be working on mainframes, and they have a bunch of labtops that they are planning on destroying. I asked if I could have some, and they agreed. Is there a way of composing a mini-mainframe by piecing together computers manually? If yes, how would I go about stringing these labtops together?

Oopsy, I forgot Condor for high throughput. For SSI there's openSSI but it's fairly inactive.  There's Kerrighed but the latest ones are only for 64 bit x86.  Don't think they been too active lately too. Plus SSI doesn't scale well either.  Most supercomputing is done with MPI anyway, as far as I know.