I've been searching and collecting links for a lot of them, but many of these tools don't have enough use case or demonstration documentation to be able to evaluate their potential worth without installing and trying them out.
I am hoping that people here have experience with some of them and can offer feedback regarding how easy they are to install, and use.
My personal use case is a couple of machine pools that are typically used in concert to work on distributed tasks. The machines are not an actual cluster (like beowulf), and my primary need is to aid in the configuration and administration of the machines. If the utility provided the ability to actually break up the work into parts and distribute those parts, that is interesting, but I need the primary use case first.
Here is the list of projects I've found that are free and open source:
I am eager to hear your thoughts!