Chase did this way back in the late 90's in the derivatives department. One day a number of traders and salespeople were complaining that their machines were all running slow. It turned out this was because the swaptions and exotics desks were running Monte Carlo simulations on everyones' machines.

After that, stealing cycles from co-workers machines was relegated to non-business hours.

It's pretty common for 3D/rendering companies to use company desktops at night or when they are idle for rendering, and most renderfarm managers support this kind of setup. However, this is only worth it because the graphists already have powerful workstations to do their job. I doubt using underpowered laptops would make sense.

I've not read about Pixar doing this, but I found it interesting that IKEA does: http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpe...

Yea, I can't find Pixar doing this. I thought I remembered an article from years ago. Other companies did it as well.

https://books.google.com/books?id=QxAEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA51&ots=...

But they might since RenderMan supports it, http://renderman.pixar.com/resources/current/tractor/tractor...

I remember reading years ago that every machine in the building was linked into the render farm.

So the person on the front desk had a dual socket, multi-GB RAM monster of a machine, but only used it for light email/room bookings/contact management. But when render jobs were running, the PC was under 100% load.

I'm not sure it'd work so well with laptops due to the battery life issue, as render jobs are presumably running 24/7. A quick search hasn't turned anything up though...