There is an increased emphasis within organizations to migrate to a distributed computing environment. Among the factors responsible for this migration are: (1) a proliferation of high performance systems based on processors such as the Intel 80{times}86, Motorola 680{times}0, RISC architecture CPU's such as MIPS R{times}000, Sun SPARC, Motorola 88000 and Intel 860 series; (2) a significant reduction in hardware costs; (3) configuration based on existing local area network technology; and (4) the same (to a large extent) operating system on all platforms. A characteristic of distributed computing is that communication takes the form of request-reply pairs. This is also referred to as the client-server model. The client-server model is rapidly growing in popularity and in many scientific and engineering environments is replacing transaction-based and mainframe systems. Over the last few years, Fermilab has been in the process of migrating to a client-server model of computing
