Reminds me of my dissertation...
Reminds me of my dissertation many years ago; wrote something similar on a network of sun's; something went wrong, process table filled up (fast) on every server (it was only meant to take a small bit from each machine).
I wasn't very popular when every terminal ground to a shuddering halt...
Wonder if they've got some form of RAID happening on the servers? Since the unit has 4 x86's in it, what'll happen if one of them fails? Could be quite a slowdown when the system needs to load in 500/4 GB of data in from some disks somewhere...