[bainbane]

I have been told that a linux distro called dynebolic is bootable from a cd drive. If you connect all your computers to a hub, it should cluster automatically too. It also comes with a nice free renderer called POV-ray, obviously not max, but I'm pretty sure you can convert the files (look on their website, its got pretty pictures). All this stuff is hearsay though, cuz although I've downloaded all the stuff, I cant seem to burn a bootable iso image for some reason.... you should be able to find all this stuff on google though.