The Open Network Computing Environment

Abstract

Networking technology is in an era of accelerated growth. The availability of international and de facto standards is leading to unprecedented inter-connectivity among systems from multiple vendors. Innovative silicon technology has dramatically reduced the cost of physical connections to high-speed local area networks. Personal processing power is benefiting from extra CPU resources that are routinely being added, improving application and network usage. Special-purpose mini-supercomputers can handle compute- and I/O-intensive tasks at a fraction of the cost of yesterday’s supercomputers.