FEDERATING COMPUTING RESOURCES ACROSS THE WEB

Hardware and software are configured to select and provision computing resources from heterogeneous on-demand computing environments through the framework of a layered, federated on-demand computing ecology of computing resource providers, users, and federation servers. These pieces of hardware and software include a mechanism for defining and managing the life cycle of different resource types; a mechanism for extending document-centric protocols to support computing resources as first order objects; a mechanism for routing messages to computing resources; federation topologies; and a mechanism for federation servers to access and use computing resources from providers controlled by other federation servers.