The technology most certainly DOES exist to implement "a standard the allows you to encapsulate and run your application cluster" and create a "standard way of launching application clusters on the hardware." It's called virtualization. With the freely available VMWare Server and VMWare Player, you could create a standard cluster node appliance and deploy it on a wide variety of hosts, even desktops and servers that have other primary uses. Think of it as SETI@Home on steroids. »