Metacomputing, an emerging technology? Original Research Article

The vision of networking computer resources to generate the compute power necessary to address “Grand Challenge” class problems was conceived in the mid-eighties. A metacomputer was referred to as a network of computers forming a coherent computing environment having the looks of a single computer. The early metacomputing experiments rather rapidly proved the concept. At the 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. Despite the fact that during the past ten years truly impressive metacomputing results have been the exception rather than the rule, the advocates of the discipline keep praising it as an emerging technology which will become a scientifically and commercially interesting approach in the near future.In this work we will evaluate metacomputing as an approach for computational (quantum) chemistry based on the experiences made from parallel computing and also based on the general developments in parallel and distributed computing.