Construction of internet for Japanese academic communities

WIDE (widely integrated distributed environment) is a research project aimed at achieving a transparent distributed environment over heterogeneous distributed computing elements with the consideration of various types of connections for internetworking. The target environment of the research is a computing environment in the academic and research communities, especially in Japan. An overview is presented of technologies being used for the achievement of project goals such as networking technologies, operating system architecture, and name space. An overview of existing academic and research computer networks in Japan, focusing on university environments where the sharing of the large-scale computing resources is conducted, is given.