Metacomputing with MILAN

The MILAN project, a joint effort involving Arizona State University and New York University, has produced and validated fundamental techniques for the realization of efficient reliable, predictable virtual machines, that is, metacomputers, on top of environments that consist of an unreliable and dynamically changing set of machines. In addition to the techniques, the principal outcomes of the project include three parallel programming systems-Calypso, Chime, and Charlotte-which enable applications to be developed for ideal, shared memory, parallel machines to execute on distributed platforms that are subject to failures, slowdowns, and changing resource availability. The lessons learned from the MILAN project are being used to design Computing Communities, a metacomputing framework for general computations.