One of the things that Plan 9 can do is seamlessly treat remote resources as if they were local. From what I can tell, this is a remote grid that you can connect a local Plan 9 instance to.
I actually had Plan 9 working on some Sun 3/50s at one point. You could use it over a 2400 baud modem... a kind of broken one where I had to listen to the connection noises and twiddle the wires at the right moment to make it connect. A bad cell phone connection would have been nice.
Never seen it taken beyond KDE though.
Then again, KDE had/has many things that nobody seems interested in replicating. like how Konqueror could be divided much like a tiled WM, with each tile holding anything from (khtml driven) web sites, to local, ssh, smb or ftp directories, or even terminals (iirc).
One could basically create just the right tool for a local or remote file management job one needed.
Sadly i have abandoned KDE since the debacle that was 4.0...