An approach to support a single service provider address image for wide area networks environment

Request dispatching mechanism is at the heart of any cluster-computing environment. The goal is to support a single service provider address image for a given cluster of workstations. That is to say a given cluster publicises a single IP address and client requests are addressed to that IP address. This means, from the client´s viewpoint, there are no nodes in the cluster, only services and the network names through which they are accessible. As a result, the cluster becomes a single virtual node. We propose a simple and elegant scheme for making the cluster transparent to clients outside the cluster such that the clients can interact with the cluster as if it were a single high-performance and highly available resource