How to work communication between different physical servers?

[eluser]JuanG[/eluser]
Thank you guys for taking the time to answer my question(s). I'd have to ask a bit more if it's ok with you:

@WanWizard: how should communication between front and back-end be implemented? How should I pass information from one computer to the other? Should I create identical accounts and log in or something? This is some implementation I have never done before so I have no idea how to communicate between machines (and let's avoid getting into the fact that I'm a beginner with CI).

Any further details on this would be great for me to get started.

@Jedd: Indeed it is pretty interesting. If I wasn't against the clock I'd be more excited than stressed out ;-). I have no mechanism for launching scripts in mind right now. I'm not clear at all. I used SOAP with php one time and it was a nightmare. Maybe I didn't use it correctly but I didn't get a warm feeling after having to analyze arrays of arrays of arrays to get the data out.

The thing is, today the user logs in to his cluster account and runs several jobs with command-line instructions. I have to somehow abstract the user from all of that. I have no idea yet on how to get into his account to read his jobs and display them on the web app, but I'll get to that later.

Now I need to find at least where to start. If you guys have more suggestions, or even a bit more details on what you've already suggested, I'll be in debt to you forever.

Thanks again for your help.