Abstract
Request dispatching mechanism is at the heart of any cluster-computing environment. The goal is to support a single service provider address image for a given cluster of workstations. That is to say, a given cluster publicizes a single IP address and client requests are addressed to that IP address. This means, from the client's viewpoint, there are no nodes in the cluster, only services and the network names through which they are accessible. As a result, the cluster becomes a single virtual node. In this paper, we propose a simple and elegant scheme for making the cluster transparent to clients outside the cluster such that the clients can interact with the cluster as if it were a single high-performance and highly available resource.