You meant to say tftp right? I'm just checking if there is some long lost technology called Tfpt that I have never heard of.

Typo.

But now with some one else's computer (aka, "the cloud")

It was always with someone else computer, we used to call it timesharing and thin clients. :)

It was especially fun when you used someone's entire computer lab during night hours ;)

Yep, I had some fun with PVM, for the audience, somehow the alternative that lost to MPI.

I mean,

> Competitiveness is a vice of mine. When I heard that a friend got Linux to boot off of NFS, I had to one-up her. I had to prove that I could create something harder, something better, faster, stronger.

sounds like they're well aware of the traditional way to do it, and are deliberately going out of their way to do something different and weird.