The Internet continues to change the models of how we organize shopping, business transactions, learning, entertainment, domain-specific projects and work in general. Expectations are rising to do more.
Shoppers can already customize and aggregate the on-line bank and investment accounts.
Industries such as chip design and biotechnology contract with compute farms for customized and scalable high performance solutions. We argue that the potential of the Internet can be explored further once the user is provided with significant choices to configure the computing environment on her own. Such an environment provides a number of choices not only for an individual user to engage in a project with distributed computing resources, but also for a distributed team to engage in collaborative projects. The major goal of this thesis is to create a powerful distributed computing environment and render it collaborative. The interconnection of such task instances forms a taskflow or a whitebox component.