Abstract: A metacomputing system is a set of geographically distributed resources, including hosts, databases, expensive instruments, etc ., interconnected by high speed networks. These resources are heterogeneous in many aspects and may best support the applications with different inherent parallelism. Most existing parallel systems are homogeneous or identical, and have no such advantage. Therefore, it is practically meaningful to develop heterogeneous metacomputing systems. WADE is a prototype of a campus wide metacomputing system. WADE is characterized by a communication model for transparent conversion between heterogeneous data formats using meta data information, a single image space with uniform programming interfaces implemented with object oriented techniques, task scheduling algorithm with precedence constraints for application scheduling in the heterogeneous environment, and the interfaces to popular parallel programming systems like PVM.