Different applications impose very different requirements on network protocols and on consistency of group communications. Naming issues include meeting administrative requirements to partition the name space and creating an implementation that scales. Caching and replication are key to scalable naming service implementation. Entities that are named include people, files, machines, services, programs, and processes. A name can uniquely identify an entity, specify membership in a group, provide information about location and function, and convey knowledge of a secret.
Protocols define the interface and interactions between entities.
Interface languages enable clients to communicate with servers in different languages. This course covers metacomputing concepts and issues are well as surveying specific metacomputing systems.