Heterogeneous distributed computing platforms continue to require substantial effort in terms of software installation and management for efficient use, often necessitating manual intervention by resource providers and end-users. In this paper we propose a novel model of resource sharing that is a viable alternative to that commonly adopted in the grid community. Our model shifts the resource virtualization and aggregation responsibilities to software at the client side, taking these burdens

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... y from resource providers. Following this model, we have designed the Zero-Force MPI toolkit that automates installation, run, and post-processing stages of HPC applications, thus allowing application scientists to focus on using computational resources instead of managing them. Through the provided console, MPI can be soft-installed across a set of distributed resources with just a few commands. The prototype implementation of the ZF-MPI toolkit is based on FT-MPI. To evaluate the toolkit, we conducted experiments with deploying and executing the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. Results demonstrate that the run-not-install approach exemplified by ZF-MPI is effective and may substantially increase productivity of application execution.