The Legion vision of a worldwide virtual computer
Andrew S. Grimshaw, Wm. A. Wulf, CORPORATE The Legion Team · Communications of the ACM · 1997
The LegionVision of a WorldwideVirtual Computer Long a vision of science fiction writers and distributed systems researchers, the notion of a worldwide computer, now taking shape through the Legion project, distributes computation like the World-Wide Web distributes multimedia, creating the illusion for users of a very, very powerful desktop computer.T ODAY'S DRAMATIC INCREASE IN AVAILABLE NETWORK BANDWIDTH WILLqualitatively change how the world computes, communicates, and collaborates.The rapid expansion of the World-Wide Web and the changes it has wrought are just the beginning.As high-bandwidth connections become available, they shrink distances and change our modes of computation, storage, and interaction.Inevitably, users will operate in a wide-area environment transparently consisting of workstations, PCs, graphics-rendering engines, supercomputers, and nontraditional computing devices, such as televisions.The relative physical locations of users and their resources is increasingly irrelevant.Realization of such an environment, sometimes called a "metasystem," is not without problems.Today's experimental high-speed networks, such as the Very