Progress

Progress has been made and continues to be made in addressing these challenges. The importance of interconnecting heterogeneous hardware and software systems in a distributed environment has been recognized, and technology to address this area is becoming available (e.g., in the forthcoming Distributed Computing Environment offering from the Open Software Foundation). A number of research projects have built and are gaining experience with high-speed networks, including experience in the design and use of efficient protocols (e.g., ATM). Operating systems such as Mach and OSF/1 contain support for explicit resource management and parallel programming. These systems have been ported to a variety of computer architectures ranging from PCs to supercomputers, providing an important base for the use of common software.