From metacomputing to metabusiness processing

The importance of large-scale electrical business processing is increasing today as recent Internet technologies build on the basic infrastructure. Simply integrating existing technologies and resources to form a platform that satisfies large-scale electrical business processing requirements is nor enough, however. Legion is a wide-area distributed object system that offers mechanisms for describing, creating, and managing objects in a large-scale, heterogeneous, distributed computing environment. Its original design objective was to build a global virtual-computer system that uses Legion as its operating system for compute-intensive applications. The paper introduces our efforts to extend the Legion system into a backbone that supports business processing with consistent resource representations, identical service interfaces, and an easy-to-use development environment. We focus on a framework that supports CORBA from within the Legion system.