Hi,
I dug as much as I could into past posts on this topic, like these 
https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2007-08/052611.html
and this https://lists.puredata.info/pipermail/pd-list/2008-05/061978.html

but I yet have to find the answer to:

How do I
a) start the GUI with no DSP ?
b) start the DSP with no GUI ?
c) have the two communicate together nicely?

So far I have only managed (on Mac OS X) to 
- start the regular Pd
- start a process with -guiport 5400 which connects to the existing GUI
- kill the DSP process that came with the GUI, the GUI still runs
- at this point, patching in the GUI is very slow and blocks are very small and the text is outside the box
- if I try to create [dac~] or [adc~] I get a "couldn't create"

There must be a better (and working) way of doing this.
Once I get it to work on one computer, I believe it should just work when using two computers, right?

Thanks,
Giulio