Speaking of distributed rendering, I want to present you a relatively new (Q4 2009) project named Corefarm. Is an open source project (alpha state) but already pretty useful.
From their page:
"Corefarm is a place where you can either submit your Yafaray rendering job or participate to other users' rendering tasks. Corefarm splits your job in several small pieces and distributes them across the internet, leading to impressive rendering times."
In current state, they are porting Corefarm to a new grid-system, named Wosoggie. I'm not a programmer, and not fully understand what is this all about, but still I can participate with CPU power and benefit from distributed render, and so can you.
For now, there is only Yafaray support, but they are planning to offer LuxRender support also.
For more infos, visit www.corefarm.org .
