Morphy is distributed chess engine written in Java. It does have strange bugs we never fixed, but that doesn't matter since you probably won't be able to get it to run due to the unpredictible life of MPI. However, the theories behind Morphy Chess are very interresting so you might want to read our report. Here is the abstract:
This report covers the development of a distributed chess engine called Morphy Chess. The goal of the project is to take an existing chess program and modify it to be distributed. The more computing power and memory available, the better the chess program should perform. At the beginning of the report we analyse a number of algorithms for playing chess, including a distribution algorithm named APHID. This is used as the basis idea for the design of a distribution algorithm, and is implemented using the MPI framework. The implementation is in the end evaluated through performance testing.
If you want to read more about Morphy, and maybe get a few questions answered, head over to the Morphy project page.