Metacomputing, an emerging technology?

The vision of networking computer resources to generate the compute power n ecessary to address "Grand Challenge" class problems was conceived in the m id-eighties. A metacomputer was referred to as a network of computers formi ng a coherent computing environment having the looks of a single computer. The early metacomputing experiments rather rapidly proved the concept. At t he same time it was realized that for metacomputing to become a useful and cost-effective approach, a wall of problems will have to be overcome. Despi te the fact that during the past tm years truly impressive metacomputing re sults have been the exception rather than the rule, the advocates of the di scipline keep praising it as an emerging technology which will become a sci entifically and commercially interesting approach in the near future. In this work we will evaluate metacomputing as an approach fur computationa l (quantum) chemistry based on the experiences made from parallel computing and also based on the general developments in parallel and distributed com puting. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.