'lo all!

I'm not much into digital art, so you may have to bear with me.

My recent roomate is into this stuff with a passion, and has a copy of Maya Unlimited. He's not much on the technical side of computing, which is where I spend the most of my time. Anyway, I have several high-powered servers in my garage that I do various things on, and recently had the idea that it might be possible to set up a small render-farm so that he could do his stuff more quickly.

The limited research I've done has come up with apps called backburner, renderman, and netrender; but making sense of all these is tricky for me, so I though you guys might be able to help.

Here's the setup:
His machine: Windows XP running Maya Unlimited
3 Servers in the garage, all running gentoo linux.
1 decently-fast workstation in the living room, running windows xp.

Is there any peice of software I can run on the other computers that would allow his computer to use their processing power?

Thanks for the help, and the patience...