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 computing environment in the academic and research communities especially in Japan. The WIDE project started its research activities at the end of 1986. The initial purpose of the group was to design the future JUNET environment. In Japan JUNET has been the only network that provides connectivities among academic and research institutes in both private and public organizations. In order to provide better computer communication with the network, interconnection of networks based on open architecture is strongly required. As the result of various studies, the project started its actual design in late 1987 and has been establishing working environments by connecting several universities with various types of links. Together with the actual state and the future plan of the WIDE project, this paper discusses the overview of technologies being employed for the achievement of project goals such as networking technologies, operating system architecture and name space. As the background status of the WIDE projects, this paper also reports an overview of existing academic and research computer networks in Japan, especially focusing on university environments where the sharing of the large scale computing resources are provided.