How new is CISS and metacomputing?
As a project, CISS is fairly new. In computing science, the dream of metacomputing has been around for decades. In various forms (and with important distinctions), it has also been known as “distributed computing”, “batch scheduling”, “cycle stealing”, and (most recently) “grid computing”. Some well-known, contemporary examples in this area include SETI@home, Project RC5/distributed.net, and the projects associated with Globus/Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA). Of course, there are many, many other related projects, including some in Canada (for example, Grid Canada). Google the above terms or look on Slashdot to find some of them.
