help! Octave, connecting laptops to "supercomputers"

[Pedro]

Hi,

I'm a laptop user & student of image, video, sound processing. Laptops
have big limitations on processing big, complex data or algorithms but
are great as a "portable terminals to connect".
In my case, my laptop have a Intel Pentium M processor 1.2 GHz.

I would like to prepare a "zombie" and strong Desktop Computer to make
him work what I do in my laptop. ( But it could be also interesting to
do a small cloud of computers to distribute the work ! )

This follows the phylosophy of paying a laptop for his portability,
and a desktop/server (fixed Computer) for processing. No, I don't want
a ultrabook with intel i7, etc.

Anyone would like to share his solution for this problem in Octave
(speficically) or in general (as a operative system)? Preferred
crossplatform solutions (If Windows or GNU/Linux users could give work
to him )
I see the BOINC app [0], but I don't know how can be used. Docs,
tutorials?? Here is a message in 2005, asking this in a similar way [1]

Octave provides packages to work in parallel processing, multicores,
etc. [2]. But i'm not interested in this, because I want a "standard
code" that anyone can execute (with his resources).

Also I'm not interested in the solution of "ssh -X" (X forwarding) or
with a full remote x server [3]with copies between computers with scp
or rsync / luckybackup

Thanks,
Pedro

[0] https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
[1] https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/help-octave/2005-November/019116.html
[2] 
http://linuxtoolkit.blogspot.com.es/2010/05/parallel-computing-and-packages-of.html
[3] http://askubuntu.com/questions/175902/remote-x-server-with-ssh-x