I'm not familiar with Condor. There are a lot of similar technologies. I broiefly helped out with MIT's project Bayanihan, which was similar. When I went to SC97, I saw at least half a dozen other projects similar in nature. There was even an MIT 50k finalist last year based on this idea.
I see what you mean by legion, and that is different.
Jini was really made for small level interactions, e.g. I walk into a random office for a meeting and realized i forgot to bring printouts, so I download the file to my PDA and have my PDA use the local printer, even thoughmy PDA had never met the printer before, or installed any type of driver.
The idea is you have a small federation of services is a veyr loosely coupled network (doesn't even have to be stable). A client can browse these services and use them at will, with no prior setup, other than the requirement of a JVM and adherence to the Jini standard.
Legion seems more like distributed computing--doing tereflop calculations. Jini wasn't designed for distributed computing, rather it allowed for basic computing in a distributed system. See the differce? It's a bit subtle, but the design decisions made in the two systems are quite different.
--Mark
hershey@vaultus.com