Managing Clusters of Geographically Distributed High-Performance Computers We present a software system for the management of geographically distributed high‐performance computers. It consists of three components: 1. The Computing Center Software (CCS) is a vendor‐independent resource management software for local HPC systems. It controls the mapping and scheduling of interactive and batch jobs on massively parallel systems; 2. The Resource and Service Description (RSD) is used by CCS for specifying and mapping hardware and software components of (meta‐)computing environments. It has a graphical user interface, a textual representation and an object‐oriented API; 3. The Service Coordination Layer (SCL) co‐ordinates the co‐operative use of resources in autonomous computing sites. It negotiates between the applications' requirements and the available system services. II(15) 887-911 887-911