The big difference is SPARC explicitly claims to be aiming to run MATLAB, Comsol and Blender. I do not know about Blender, but the first two pieces of software are incredibly expensive and require core-based licensing. This means if you want to spread your job to double the machines, you need double the licences. Further, any research done in this software needs a special research licence, which is even more expensive.
Unless they have 1000s of licences or an agreement with e.g. Mathworks who publishes MATLAB, this is 100% illegal.
Doesn't sound like they've researched it that thoroughly..
Exactly. It sounds like they picked an ongoing desire from the research community, then grabbed the closest thing that already exists, and promised to bridge the gap.
There is no evidence I can find of any progress towards that though... If they are really capable of doing it, they would only need to present a single working distributed CPU model for MATLAB and they would have money thrown at them. They could even sell such load leveling software to every university. I assume nothing has actually been done yet, mainly because it cannot be done without the blessing of Mathworks.