As a folding farm starts to grow, just like in a corporate network you start to experience growing pains and management of all the machines can become a real nightmare. Each machine running its own OS and just folding seems simple enough, which it can be, however the model can be simplified down even more. When I was making folding machine I would try to dig up any hard drive I could that was about 500MB or bigger for whatever bargain price someone was willing to accept. Usually they would run fine for a few weeks then die, or just act up randomly. Needless to say this was a real pain. By setting up folding machines to boot over the network, it eliminates the need for a hard drive, and even a video card.