Has anyone looked at operating systems like Plan 9 which divide the services into 3 sets (terminal, file, process) and then distribute them over various machines (and cpu's in multi-cpu systems) on a 'cost' basis? This would effectively address the issue of where named, httpd, or whatever was running. Mainly because it would never run on the same machine (or cpu) each time or necessarily all the time (ie run a while here then over there).