distributed queue?

[Paul Rubin]

Does anyone have an implementation of a distributed queue?  I.e. I
have a long running computation f(x) and I'd like to be able to
evaluate it (for different values of x) on a bunch of different
computers simultaneously, the usual "worker thread" pattern except
distributed across a network.  I guess this is pretty easy to write
with a centralized socket listener that dispatches requests through a
Queue to multiple threads on the same machine, each talking
synchronously to a server socket.  I wonder if something like it
already exists.  I see a little bit of discussion in the newsgroup
archive but no obvious pointers to code.

Thanks.