What I would like to accomplish: small programs running on various machines, accepting computing jobs.

This roughly fits what MPI and PVM's are all about, but both ( and other similiar solutions ) require relatively large pieces of software to be installed, and require rather lengthy configuration. (Also, I would expect problems when trying to run compute nodes on windoze machines)

What I've got in mind, is simple executable, possibly without dependencies, that just listens on some TCP port, accepts jobs, and returns results.

This needs not to be fast, nor efficient, main advantage should be ease of installation/configuration.

How do I think perl can solve this?

Well, the most important piece of puzzle would be PAR, that would solve 'wrapping whole computing mess into single file' problem.

And after that... at first I thought about Sandbox, but I think I'm too green to efficiently use it, right now what I've got in mind is XML::RPC paired with eval. After it's all running smoothly I'll think about sandboxing and security...

Maybe instead of fighting with secure sandboxing one should just stop thinking about it, set up some kind of access control and forget about it?

I looked a bit around, but haven't seen anyone doing something like this, is it because this problem is too big for single busy programmer to handle on his own?

In reply to Perl Grids by Eyck

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