Something I've been pondering for a long time: Distributed John. Now my plans to dominate the school and eventually the world are that much closer to fruition, and I am yet again saved having to figure out this whole "programming for myself" thing. An MPI-aware version would be better I think (at least for my porpoises) but this will do for now. I think some sort of message passing interface would solve the problem of individual nodes having to be the same specs as well.
(Update: 02 October, should have been earlier - there's an MPI john.)