Design and implementations of Ninf: towards a global computing infrastructure

The world-wide computing infrastructure on the growing computer network technology is a leading technology to make a variety of information services accessible through the Internet for every user from the high-performance computing users through many of personal computing users. The important feature of such services is location transparency; information can be obtained irrespective of time or location in virtually shared manner. In this article, we overview Ninf, an ongoing global network-wide computing infrastructure project which allows users to access computational resources including hardware, software and scientific data distributed across a wide area network. Preliminary performance result on measuring software and network overhead is shown, and that promises the future reality of world-wide network computing. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.