DISCWorld: an environment for service-based matacomputing

We describe our DISCWorld system for wide-area, high-performance metacomput ing in which we adopt a high-level, service-based approach. Users' client p rograms request combinations of services from a set of server nodes which c ommunicate at a peer-based level. DISCWorld is a constrained metacomputing system, running only the service operations its participating resource admi nistrators have chosen to provide and advertise, and provides a common inte gration environment for clients to access these services and developers to make them available. We discuss our software architecture and experiences b uilding DISCWorld using Java and CORBA components, and the associated resea rch issues for metacomputing that we are addressing. (C) 1999 Elsevier Scie nce B.V. All rights reserved.