This paper discusses the I-WAY project and provides an overview of the papers in this issue of IJSA. The I-WAY is an experimental environment for building distributed virtual reality applications and for exploring issues of distributed wide area resource management and scheduling. The goal of the I-WAY project is to enable researchers use multiple internetworked supercomputers and advanced visualization systems to conduct very large-scale computations. By connecting a dozen ATM testbeds, seventeen supercomputer centers, five virtual reality research sites, and over sixty applications groups, the I-WAY project has created an extremely diverse wide area environment for exploring advanced applications. This environment has provided a glimpse of the future for advanced scientific and engineering computing.