Distributed computing

does anyone know if there exists an effort to bring some kind of 
distributed computing to R? The most simple functionality I'm after is 
to be able to explicitly perform a task on a computing server. Sorry if 
this is a non-informed newbie question...

As an alternate to the PVM/MPI interfaces mentioned by other people, I am
working on a (very soon to be released) project for using the ScaLAPACK library
[1] through a simple R interface.  If the tasks that you want run an a computing
server are simple (LAPACK) functions (solve, svd, etc) and not whole R scripts,
then this be useful.


David Bauer

[1] http://www.netlib.org/scalapack/