Not really? At the moment it's done by some user-land job scheduler. That could be something container based like k8s, something in-process like ray, or a workload manager like slurm.
If you use something like cockroachdb you can have a multi-master cluster and use regional-by-row tables to locate data close to users. It'll fail over fine to other regions if needed.
For literature search that might be ok. It doesn't need to replace any other tools, and if 1/10 it surfaces something you wouldn't have found otherwise it could be worth the time on the dud attempts.