OpenSSI is an open-source single-system image clustering system

I never used something like OpenSSI, but I'd be surprised if running over (presumably) Ethernet of the time worked well for an SSI compared with the "expensive" things like SGI Origin with fast links and hardware coherence. Solutions like that still exist, and there's the SCI standard. Current things like NVlink and CAPI seem to be rather in the same direction.

I don't think Kubernetes is a fundamentally different abstraction to the (HPC) distributed resource managers that ran on shared- and distributed-memory systems of the time. (In that space MPI somewhat standardizes remote memory access and process spawning.)

Plan9 :]

This. I'm really bummed that so many of these things-- OpenMosix, OpenSSI, Kerrighed, etc, have died.

There's a lot of utility in stitching together many systems into one-- a middle ground between loosely coupled application-controlled distributed concurrency and tightly coupled SMP/NUMA.

Like if you want a big multiuser build farm, for instance, where you're not drowning in IPC and synchronization, but not everything maps well to distcc.