I talked about a variation of this idea with pg, and he brought up some important points. First, who uses enterprise software like distributed computing? Outside of research, it's people unlike us, so what do we know about them? Pretty much nothing. Additionally, what IT manager at a solid company is going to buy the "el cheapo" (pg's phrase) solution when there are guys from Sun telling him/her "Just buy our system, and if anything bad happens, we'll fix it, and you won't lose your job."

BTW, the RSA Factoring Challenge has been over for some time: http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2092.

But back to my first point, what else - besides trying to factor big numbers - would I/you/a-20-something-hacker do with a big distributed network? I can't think of anything.