My thoughts would be that you'd probably save yourself a lot of effort by setting up ssh keys on each system and doing all the work on the main site. That way you don't have to do nearly as much synchronization and maintaining of multiple running instances that all need to communicate. Just use remote ps calls, remote run your apps (which makes them local instances sort of) and check /proc/loadavg for system load info. Don't make things harder than you have to. Then the only actual hard part you need to write is the part that decides when to use which computer and how to decide your resource allocation. (my code also handles time based allocation i.e. don't run until at least 4pm)