[tardedmeme]

One could argue that multiple cores are already not seamless especially if you have NUMA (now available in high-end desktops by the way! and every multi-socket system that's ever existed) and the distinction between RAM and disk is very not seamless and so is any other number of things you'd hope the OS would magically handwave away for you but it doesn't.

10Gbps is now very cheap and 100Gbps is viable at hobby scale. That's Ethernet. I don't know anything about CXL and so on.

[druid]

Exactly how I'm thinking about it. NUMA, the RAM/disk hierarchy, CXL. Operators have always abstracted over nonuniform substrates with very different latency tiers. The fabric inside a modern server is already a small network. But the argument for an OS at the cluster level isn't that the interconnect becomes seamless, but that the substrate becomes standardized, regardless of underlying hardware.