The contractors-an alternative paradigm for worldwide virtual computing

Existing technology has made it possible that the entire range of machines, from personal computers to very high performance parallel supercomputers, be interconnected to become an integrated computational environment for users and programmers. However, efficient management of the huge amount of computation resources thus available remains as the greatest challenge to the designers of such metasystems. In this paper, we propose to have “a layer of contractors” as an alternative paradigm to the implementation of a single worldwide virtual computer. Our experience showed that the scope of a contractor can be extended easily to embrace machines beyond existing LAN boundaries