You may take a click over to http://www.distributed.net and check out their way of doing things. I participated in the rc5-64 challenge for a few years. IIRC, I'm pretty sure the details of their operation is available for reading somewhere on the site.
But the problems distributed.net are working on are very
specialized problems - they are the problems were nodes
need no communication with each other, except for exchanging
some information with a central node, but even that is not
very much. Communication between nodes is certainly not a
limiting factor for their kind of problems, but it appears
to be the case for the OP.