Here's the trick:

To run a dist computing app like say folding@home on multiple pxe booted clients- you'd need a different image for each to boot from. They would all want to fold onto an NFS export on the server, but would so so to the same directory which would not be good. What'd you need is for the folding script to fold to a different directoy on the server for each client.

ie:

/data/fold1
/data/fold2
/data/fold3
etc

Where /data is exported via NFS.

Each client's fold script has to know that it has its own specific fold directory on the server. So I'd think that each client would have to have its own image to be booted. This means the server has to boot each client with a different image (though it wouldn't have to dedicate an image to a specific client).

Maybe instead of multiple images, it could just be written into the script to ask the server how many clients are currently active and fold into the appropriate directory based on that...

See what I'm saying? I badly want to do this. To create a dozen or more images each with just a slight variation in the scripts for folding@home. That way I can make a pre-packaged knoppix server CD, and provide client images for download so that user's can quickly hd-install a server and add the client images and have the whole package preconfigured so that setup will take less than an hour, most of it just waiting for the hd-install and for images to be untarred.

I think this is also what the original poster is hoping to do. And the idea is to make it modular- folding, seti, whatever DC app you wanted could have scripts. distcc for that matter too. Let this act as a cluster for compiling....