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Is there any way to set up a distributed computing system on a small number of home machines over a local network? Is there any software that makes this possible?

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Yes - but it depends on what sort of computing you want to do – Mark Feb 20 '11 at 23:05
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Sure. Hapood and MPI both work on Linux. Most of the software involved in cluster computing these days is open-source.

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Is there anything that works on windows based machines? – Peter Feb 20 '11 at 23:42
Not that I know of. If you want to learn or model real-world distributed computing you should run it on Linux. That's what everybody else does. – Keith Feb 20 '11 at 23:46
Just to note that Linux can be run in VMs (VMWare/VirtualBox) on each Windows machine, which should be okay for experimenting or proof of concept. Beyond that, you might want to also look into GPU computing - CUDA & such. – Joe Internet Feb 21 '11 at 0:02
You can also run the freely licensed ESXi from VMware. With that you could potentially run many Linux and WIndows VMs, depending on your hardware. – Keith Feb 21 '11 at 0:06
Thanks for all the great responses. Are either of these options easy to implement or do they require professional skills? – Peter Feb 21 '11 at 1:45
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