The paper discusses a wide range of aspects of representing and using metainformation, which plays a significant role in the high-performance wide-area distributed computing. Main classes of computational grid objects are described which should be represented in the form of metadata. The notion of a metacomputing information service (MIS) is introduced and the basic operations are described which must be supported by such a service. An approach to the implementation of MIS is presented which is based on the LDAP directory service. Several aspects of application of MIS are discussed which are connected with the efficient management of computational tasks and planning of computations in the metacomputing environment. etc. The analysis enables to describe some important aspects of LDAP such as the mechanisms for organization and administering the distributed directory, which are not currently included into the standard and are not well described in the literature.

information systems,metacomputing

Programming, parallel computing, multimedia