The machines are 166MMX with a hard drive and 64megs of ram. I am trying to do this on the cheap. I have been reading about people setting up beowulf style clusters with older machines just to see if this can be done. Just load up the OS, put the machines somewhere out of the way and you are done.
Remote administration is no problem at all.
Just ssh in and you are all set. If you prefer X you can either use VNC or just a remote X session. I have considered setting up a beowulf cluster just to try it out. I probably will when I get some spare time. For this situation it is probably not necessary.