One way for a center such as this to expand its capabilities would be to team up with another similarly equipped center, such as the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. He warns, however, that the field of metacomputing still is in its infancy. A number of issues make it far more complex than simply hardwiring several systems together. For metacomputing to work, scientists first must tackle the problem of integrating heterogeneous systems. We have one brand here and one brand there.
Vendors talk about open systems, but they're far from that.
The network that links these machines is another concern. Sanielevici points out that the network used to connect the systems currently is only capable of transferring data at 155 megabytes per second. This creates a large gap between the machines' capabilities and how fast the data can be transferred. This gap between capabilities causes another problem that must be overcome by the software running on the machine. Unlike parallel systems, for which older code sometimes can be modified, metacomputers can use only code specifically designed for metacomputing.