I love Perl, but there are other tools in the toolbox. I'm not sure if Perl would be my solution to something that is expected to run so slowly I'd need many machines.

That said, I'm sort of surprised (after an admittedly quick search) that there's nothing on there that lets you use Perl as a glue to manage your distributed project.

Edit: Glad I admitted it was a lazy and quick search. I should have learned never to bet against something being on CPAN.