Hi
jettero,
I occasioanlly work on "trivially" or "embarassingly" parallelizable problems. For me this most often involves computing a single statistic from a dataset over a large combination of parameters. The most efficient solution for me has been to use R with the Rmpi package to interface with MPI. Depending on the scope of the task, I may also use MySQL for distributing the dataset and collecting the results using RMySQL.
I could see doing the same thing in perl with PDL, Parallel::MPI, and your favorite database.