While this outcome is definitely unfortunate, what happened here is that the user submitted a job at default 5.0 power level, and then did not select a single frame to render, but rather accepted the default frame range of frames 0-100. So PixelPlow started a 100 frame job and thus was consuming resources across 50 or more machines simultaneously, each trying to render its own full image. This is essentially the result of not checking all settings on the submission form before pressing submit, and with money on the line I'm not sure why one would do that.
It's troubling that this may be a common issue with PixelPlow users, but I think if you look at the job submission steps and the settings you have available, you should be able to see that you'd want to change some of those defaults depending on your needs. I do think a "Render Single Tiled Image" checkbox might be a good idea for their submission tool though, but of course people would still have to check that box and not simply accept the defaults.
- Oshyan