there was a whole movement exploring distributed shared memory in the early 90s, using VM hardware to trigger distributed swap with coherency protocols on top.

there was a whole movement exploring distributed shared memory in the early 90s, using VM hardware to trigger distributed swap with coherency protocols on top. in fact there was a parallel version of OSF/1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_shared_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_shared_memory which isn't to say that low latency and high bandwidth doesn't make this a lot more feasible. fault tolerance is pretty hard though :)