Hi Mamajuanauk,

Yes BOINC absolutely will run like this (server & headless/diskless clients) it's already been done with this distro for example.

The Ubuntu used is a little old now, but fine for crunching.

Have alot of fun!

Probably not, I expect the nodes would run, just as fast as the nodes could run, and no faster.Why would they do anything else?
However, I would expect to see a small saving in electricity costs.No hard drives etcetera.

Look, here are my historical thoughts/ramblings about clusters/beowulfs and such like.

In 2006 I started crunching. A dual core processor was a supercomputer.
The idea of a multi-node cluster is very attractive in 2006/7/8.

But, by the time 2013 comes around.We already have 8 cores in a box, running 16 threads!So why bother?

BECAUSE IT'S FUN, and you learn stuff about networks/filesystems/the real guts of computing/ by doing practical cluster building. It's cool to see a diskless node boot over the network and start to crunch science.

So give it a go.

Edited: Cos I aint no speller nor gramma pefectionist!