I have 3 old computers lying around right now running a P2 at 800 MHz(?), Intel Mobile 1.6 GHz, AMD Athlon XP 2000+ at 1.66 GHz, and (might not use this) P4 at 2.7 GHz, all with 512 MB Ram, and am considering clustering them together for fun/knowledge. They would be running an undecided version of linux, preferably ubuntu based.

The issue is what I want to use it for: general computing and occasional video encoding. By general computing I mean day to day tasks. However I'm not sure if every program started by a single X session is going to exist on the same machine, defeating the purpose of such a system. Will programs be split up or exist on one machine?

Second, assuming this is running 100baseT ethernet (not sure if the PCI slot itself could handle Gigabit), would the speed of having a program exist over the network be an issue? It seems that the constant asking of various things in RAM would be quite slow.

And before you say "buy another computer!", that's not the point of this question. I'm asking would it be usable, not necessarily practical. And yes I know, this is going to be extreamly power consuming.