A fundamental issue in working with and designing software applications for distributed computer clusters is selecting the mechanism for providing inter-process and inter-computer communication and coordination. Although several well-established facilities exist for managing access to remote computers, there are applications where these facilities do not adequately meet the application needs. In this paper, we summarize the characteristics of these applications and present a new software package - the remote process interface (RPI) library - as a viable alternative for managing independent processes executing on remote computers. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.