Out of curiosity maybe or general interest but I find that all this big push to "Cloud" computing and clustering lately has still been missing something. All the different cloud computing systems out there seem to all be very much application based. Like running clustered apache setups that allow resources to be dynamically reassigned between users of the system. Now this isn't bad per say, but it is missing the point by a bit. Not saying that the idea is bad or offering services in a cloud is off, just incomplete.
Basically the idea of clustering and failover servers has been around for quite some time. This whole cloud computing is relatively new by comparison. But even though clustering has been around for a while it is still horribly limited to if the applications have support for it built in. A limitation sure but hasn't been that debilitating to the whole idea. Adding to this particular avenue there are still plenty of programs out there, including games that don't even take full advantage of multi-core systems.
The idea at this point is to either have options at the hardware level or kernel level of an operating system to basically hardwire several systems together and have them all act as one. This would also be regardless of the physical distances between the computers. This would open up a huge range of possibilities, from running extremely power hungry games on a three-four not so high end machines, to having multiple virtual machines that share a grouping of hardware but the system dynamically allocates process/memory to the virtual machines that need it as the resources are needed. The range of possibilities increases significantly from gaming to development and everything in between.
Obviously even such a system would have it's own set of security/performance etc difficulties that would need to be overcome. But today anymore I think the focus on the bigger more powerful processors is a bit redundant, same with the bigger uber powerful single computers. Making a smaller, more efficient system is not only better but can have better results. I know that there are already a couple of good pretty small machines, like the VIA pico-itx or the upcoming mobile-itx. Really I could stuff about 10+ of the pico-itx in cases in the same space a mid tower is taking up and they are all running at about 1ghz with a 1 gig of ram so they are pretty decent. I still think it can be better and more tightly packed. Maybe when I get some stuff situated I might work on a setup of the mini-itx version as they are pretty cheap and it would be fun.
