Realistically the compute-density of anything but made-for-purpose kit at the moment makes clustering desktop PCs at any scale economically infeasible. We think in units of computational power per kilowatt (including cooling) and per tonne of floor loading nowadays.
The only play in the desktop space is hoovering up unused cycles on desktops that an organization happens to own anyway, primarily for interactive use.
Also, that FORTRAN is a strong presence in numerical computing is very, very common knowledge. Someone who learnt that yesterday is unlikely to have much experience with large-scale computation... Certainly not enough to pull off the democratization of supercomputing by himself.