I've been using CrowdRender for the past few days and I was able to get a whole animation done, but one thing that keeps coming up is frame tiles not syncing. Even though I can connect to other nodes and they say they are synced, and even after resyncing them, I'll find different tiles are starting on different frames, or seemingly rendering the same frame over and over. Here's some examples to show what I mean, though I've had this happen with other scenes too: (excuse the memes, needed to test alembic on an animated model)

UPDATE: So the unique thing about this scene is it was originally created/animated in Maya, and I exported the models and animation using alembic. I imported it into Blender and remade the shaders and it played the animation. I packed the blend file so the textures travelled. When I rendered using CrowdRender my local machine would animate, but the render nodes would all still be in the T pose and wouldn't animate. What I didn't realize was that even if I packed the blend file, the alembic animation was getting its data from the alembic file, which is referenced in a mesh sequence cache modifier.

The good news is, I seem to have gotten the tiles to work! The solution is to have a central server where you can host the alembic file, then do an absolute path to the .abc file in the mesh sequence cache modifier. Then save and resync the scene. If the render nodes have access to the absolute path mentioned in the modifier, it seems they will get the animation and the tiles will be synced. So I guess consider my question solved!