Abstract. Harness is the next generation heterogeneous distributed computing package being developed by the PVM team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Tennessee, and Emory University. This paper describes the changing trends in cluster computing and how Harness is being designed to address the future needs of PVM and MPI application developers. Harness (which will support both PVM and MPI) will allow users to dynamically customize, adapt, and extend a virtual machine's features to more closely match the needs of their application and to optimize for the underlying computer resources. This paper will describe the architecture and core services of this new virtual machine paradgm, our progress on this project, and our experiences with early prototypes of Harness.