Why limit yourself to in-memory storage? I'd definitely assume we have all our storage content memory mapped onto our cluster too, in this world. People have be

Why limit yourself to in-memory storage? I'd definitely assume we have all our storage content memory mapped onto our cluster too, in this world. People have been building exabyte (1M gigabytes) scale datacenters since well before 2010, and 16 exabytes, the current Linux limit according to the most upvoted post here, isn't that much more inconceivable. Having more space available usually opens up more interesting possibilities. I'm going to rattle off some assorted options. If there's multiple paths to a given bit of data, we could use different addresses to refer to different paths. We could do something like ILA in IPv6, using some of the address as a location identifier: having enough bits for both the location and the identity parts of the address without being too constrained would be helpful. We could use the extra pointer bits for tagged memory or something like CHERI, which allow all kinds of access-control or permission or security capabilities. Perhaps we create something like id's MegaTexture, where we can procedurally generate data on the fly if given an address. There's five options for why you'd want more address space than addressable storage. And I think some folks are already going to be quite limited & have quite a lot of difficulty partitioning up their address space, if they only have for example 1.6m buckets of 1TB (one possible partitioning scheme). The idea of being able to refer to everything anywhere that does or did exist across a very large space sure seems compelling & interesting to me!