Anyhow, anywhere: the rise of open distributed processing

In the next revolution in computing, programmers will continue to program to a virtual machine, but behind this unitary programming interface will lie, not a single computer, but multiple computers at various locations, with different machine architectures, different operating systems and running code in a multiplicity of programming languages. The umbrella name for this new era of computational freedom is open distributed processing, or ODP. ODP will radically enhance the capacity to design and operate complex systems comprising many physically distributed, heterogeneous computers. The author discusses the architecture of ODP as developed by the Advanced Network Systems Architecture project, ANSAware, a toolkit for ODP system development, and ODP standards