Of course. Comparing to USB thumb drives, SSD is much more complicated things, and consumes more power in deed.


So these servers HAS NO DISK INSTALLED in fact, is it?

Maybe the reason I felt so neglect about running an OS on a thumb drive 24/365 is just out of my idea about thumb drives. I felt that thumb drives ought to be used when transferring work documents and so on(Oh of course they make good boot disks(PE, gparted, clonezilla, etc.) on emergency occasions too). But when coming to think about a real OS I won't consider that.

It's not that they can't make it(as you already know), but they're not MADE TO DO SUCH THINGS(Except those specially made for that reason). Pen drives are made to transfer small/large amount of data from one place to another, and HDD/SSDs are the one supposed to handle the whole OS.

As the design concept differs, products' characters went in the different way:
SSD/HDD implemented technologies that expand capacities,extends lifetime, and added some extras like SED, physical tamper-proof(data center/sensitive data storage), exceptional performance(gamers) and so on for those one in need.
Pen drives, on the other hand, optimized products for better performance and capacities as well, but not many factories applied life extension technologies, because they think pen drives are not supposed to be used so frequently: Several files coming in from this computer, then several files coming out to another, and stay in a drawer(or wherever) for TENS OF HOURS. They also have no support for TRIM or wear leveling algorithms, thus has no way to handle frequent write focused on a small amount of nand flash(which will lead to early end of flash module lifetime).
Also, though greatly improved, most pen drives' is still too slow to install OS on. Also, though Linux-based OSes can boot very fast, x window systems like gnome/kde/xfce/mate can cause excessive IO. Unless you do not wish to install gui for them and always manage them from your desktop computer, like this:

But, even without GUI, BOINC and the OS itself is still going to cause a lot of IO. Below are the data I got from my VM running only BOINC (I even removed rsyslog and other useless services):

BOINC caused about 60MB during the last 1 hour, I haven't download a single assignment and focuses on crunching FAHB(Fight AIDS@Home) during the hour. So that would be more than 0.5TB to your usb drive (16GB?) per year of crunching. If that pen drive really survived that, then it must be a REALLY, REALLY GOOD one.
I havn't had a usb drive that was not damaged with 0.5TB of p/e amount.
And I really hate to see broken pen drives on my desk. LOL

You can change linux hostname by editing /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts together and reboot to take effect.

But by now your servers have been registered on the wcg server already, I suppose there's no way to change the name displayed on the site.


https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/help/viewTopic.do?shortName=devmanage#141

I could try that, but since it does not cause any problems at the moment, I am just going to leave well enough alone. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Thanks for the suggestion though.
Cheers

Of course that will do, too.