Cool stuff. I’m assuming that cluster software isn’t really available/affordable/user-friendly enough for mainstream desktop OS’s (OSX or XP), but how cool would it be to have that setup on a home network? Using your wife’s/kid’s computers to help speed up a video encoding session would be pretty sweet. I haven’t got a clue as to what technical difficulties that may pose, but I’m suprised it hasn’t been implemented in some fashion, especially on a Mac. I do know that Logic Pro has a “distributed computing” mode that allows additional computers to be added to speed up processing, but OS-level integration could allow any process (from any program) to be “outsourced” to the cluster (of course, that would mean that all of these processes would have to be fully multi-threaded, which a lot of programs aren’t, but as we move more and more towards multi-core, I’m sure we’ll see quite a few more multi-threaded apps). One day, sending a task out to a cluster could be as user-friendly as accessing a network drive.

-Bryan