The access to distributed high performance computing facilities for execution of Java programs has generated considerable interest. A metacomputing system, or meta system, allows uniform access to heterogeneous resources. Our case study is suma, a meta system defined as a set of corba components, offering services for execution of both sequential and parallel applications. This document describes the most important aspects of suma design in terms of corba services. We present some experimental results related to execution overhead in a campus-wide environment.