Linking Mac minis together?

Hey,
Was in my local apple store the other day looking at options for new macs. I was told you could link up multiple mac minis to share cpu load but cant find anything about this on the web.
Was the bloke talking rubbish or is this possible? Has anyone done it and if so how does it work?

There is actually a possibility to do so, though with some limitations. This ability is built in OSX so there is nothing more to have than 2 (at least) available macs.
It's called XGrid ; basically one mac is the controller, and other are "agents" to which tasks are distributed. If you're familiar to, it can be (roughly) compared to something like seti@home
I've never used it myself so I recommend you to refer to this article, who explains it all :
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/xgrid.html

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