BUILDING A VIRTUAL MACHINE-ROOM - A FOCAL POINT IN METACOMPUTING

Computing resources which are transparently available to the user via networked environments are commonly called a metacomputer. In this sen se, a metacomputer is a network of heterogeneous, computational resour ces linked by software in such a way that they can be used as easily a s a single computational unit. During the last few years our work has been concentrated on developing methods and tools to provide a transpa rent and vendor independent hardware management system to the users. S olving this problem up to a high abstraction level will bring the idea of metacomputing a large step closer to its fruition. After reviewing the metacomputing approaches in Europe and the States, we will break down the task force into almost independent units. One of these, the r esource access and allocation problem, the project Computing Center So ftware was focused on. This paper takes a closer look at CCS. Its unde rlying model which uses abstract views for specifying system component s and the general purpose Resource Description Language will be sketch ed. We will explain how it is possible to support Wide-Area Network ac cess and unstable connection lines. Afterwards, we will present the sy stem and vendor independent batch processing facility usable for arbit rary programming environments. On-going activities and an enhancement of the CCS methodology to solve a core problem in wide-area metacomput ing will conclude this paper.