Well, if you want to play that game, you can look further back to HTCondor which has been doing this since 1989. I'm sure earlier examples exist as well, given that the concept itself isn't all that esoteric.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of HTCondor before but have recently become more interested in bioinformatics, which seems to use this quite a bit (at least in Cambridge). I'll have a read, thanks for the heads up :)
