See action items at the end. I would recommend ASC (
DoD modernization) participation in proposed initiative

Short Report on Workshop on Seamless Computing
(http://www.ecmwf.int/html/seamless)
September 16-17 Reading England at ECMWF
European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

Organizer: Jim Almond from ECMWF
Keynote Speech: G. Fox
(http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/seamless97)

About 30 Participants -- mainly from Europe
This had similarities to MAPINT97 except it was 
focussed on "interoperable interfaces" and studied
"computing" and not application issues. Many of 
participants were from staff of large computer centers and
so practical issues were uppermost. Multidisciplinary
applications were not studied but metacomputing was discussed
as context.

As at MAPINT97, von Laszewski and Grimshaw gave talks on
Globus and Legion respectively. Another American talk was
from Devaney (NIST) on their WebSubmit system which is an
interoperable Web interface.

Other talks were from European participants in metacomputing and
interoperable (seamless) interfaces. Perhaps the most important (to ASC)
was UNICORE which is a significant German funded project to develop
a common interface to a set of Supercomputers including SGI-Cray, IBM
and Japanese vendors. Note each of 4 vendors is committing about 
.5 person-years each to support this activity by mapping common interface
to their hardware platforms.

In the final afternoon, a pretty good discussion was had which resulted
in (from my point of view) some good agreed directions.
It was agreed that it was desireable to agree on a set of common
services and capabilities needed by jobs (the so called abstract job
or abstract machine). As a start to defining these, a web page will be
produced with relevant links and with both a one page executive
summary and a longer white paper summarizing issues in areas where
common services need to be defined. The summary and white paper will
be produced off-line by the participants with editing by Jim Almond
and Mark Baker (Now at Portsmouth,England but an ex-staff member of NPAC
who spent summer in Syracuse working in this area)
A Birds of a Feather Session will be held at SC97 and Baker will
edit a special issue of Concurrency:Practice and Experience for
papers on this topic.
Other action items include solicitation of vendor interest!