Metacomputing – What’s in it for me?

Before we can answer the challenge posed by the title of this paper, we need to define what a metasystem is. Physically, a metasystem is a collection of geographically separated resources (people, computers, instruments, databases) connected by a high speed network. A metasystem is distinguished from a simple collection of computers by a software layer, often called middleware, which transforms a collection of independent resources into a single, coherent, virtual machine. This machine should be as simple to use as the machine on the user’s desktop, and should allow easy collaboration between colleagues located anywhere in the world.