The strength of the partners derives from the fact that they combine research teams with long standing experience with protocol design and with the ALF/ILP concepts specifically. The project partners will use the environment to test and evaluate applications. European and Australian companies will benefit from automatic configuration of communication subsystems to perform rapid prototyping of high performance distributed applications. Each partner has access to industrial groups which can evaluate and/or exploit the tools developed within the project. The results of this project should be forwarded in a later stage to the corresponding standardization bodies in order to trigger discussions on the proposed architecture.