With systems such as Grid Engine, Condor and others, it is relatively easy these days for organizations to create robust distributed compute farms. See how the Grid::Request Perl module can make the authoring, submission and control of large distributed jobs easy and in a scheduler agnostic manner.
Perl's Post Modern Object System, Moose, provides an excellent way to simplify Object Oriented Design. Learn, or re-learn, the basics of Object Oriented Programming's design principles in this talk that focuses on the four fundamentals of a good object system: Abstraction, Encapsulation, Polymorphism, and Introspection.