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> all machines shared the same filesystem(NFS) and passwd (I forget this was), so using all the CPUs in the building was easy.

Sun did this through NIS, originally Yellow Pages/YP, but name changed for trademarks.

When I worked at Yahoo, corp machines typically participated in an automounter config so your home would follow you around, it was super convenient (well, except when the NFS server, which might be your personal corp dev machine under your desk, went away, and there was no timeout for NFS operations... retry until the server comes back or heat death of the universe). They used a sync script to push passwords out, rather than NIS though --- a properly driven sync script works almost as fast, but has much better availability, as long as you don't hit an edge case (I recall someone having difficulty because they left the company and came back, and were still listed as a former employee in some database, so production access would be removed automatically)