HARNESS: Heterogeneous Adaptable Reconfigurable NEtworked SystemS

We describe our vision, goals and plans for HARNESS, a distributed, reconfigurable and heterogeneous computing environment that supports dynamically adaptable parallel applications. HARNESS builds on the core concept of the personal virtual machine as an abstraction for distributed parallel programming, but fundamentally extends this idea, greatly enhancing dynamic capabilities. HARNESS is being designed to embrace dynamics at every level through a pluggable model that allows multiple distributed virtual machines (DVMs) to merge, split and interact with each other. It provides mechanisms for new and legacy applications to collaborate with each other using the HARNESS infrastructure, and defines and implements new plug-in interfaces and modules so that applications can dynamically customize their virtual environment. HARNESS fits well within the larger picture of computational grids as a dynamic mechanism to hide the heterogeneity and complexity of the nationally distributed infrastructure. HARNESS DVMs allow programmers and users to construct personal subsets of an existing computational grid and treat them as unified network computers, providing a familiar and comfortable environment that provides easy-to-understand scoping