> This is the premise for what my clustering project works.  It is the
> idea of extending SMP to be SMP over the net.  That is to say load
> balance processes across multiple CPU's.  Sort of like NUMA (Non
> Uniform Memory Access architecture, where a bunch of machines are 
> bolted together with a low latency interconnect and one OS runs across
> all of the machines.) except that the OS would no longer be the single
> point of failure (other issues arrise though about coherency.)
> ...
> I had thought about setting up an alternate page mapping scheme that
> that has an extension from just swapped in or swapped out, but swapped
> to another machine.  

This sounds a lot like a distributed shared memory system, a topic
near and dear to my heart.  If you haven't already, you may want to visit some
of the pages listed on http://www.pdcl.eng.wayne.edu/~sumit/research/dsm.html
(which I chose at random from a web search for the DSM I'm most familiar
with, Munin).