Still delivering on VMs, might be out of fashion, but it works, everyone gets it, and I get back home on time.
I'm not super familiar with plan 9, but given what I do know, I'm pretty sure that could be done with an rc script. I'm pretty sure that a) you can fork processes after starting them on remote systems, and b) you can query remote systems to figure out which ones have free resources. Given that, it's just a shell / rc script away. Then you just need another script to do the management. ;)
It reminds me of how electric cars are a 190 year old technology whose actual peak popularity was 120 years ago. Yet here we are, with manufacturers predicting they'll finally be popular again, in 10 to 15 years.