The goal of the Albatross project is to better understand application behavior on wide-area networks. A recent technology trend is Cluster Computing, where high-speed clusters of workstations are themselves connected over lower-speed links. Cluster Computing raises a host of research issues such as fault tolerance, performance, and programmability. The focus of Albatross is on programmability and performance. Cluster Computing is approached from the applications side. It is obvious that parallel applications that communicate heavily need a high-speed link to function properly. On the other side of the scale, parallel applications that hardly communicate at all will also work well over a slow link. Cluster Computing has both types of interconnect. In Albatross we try to find out which applications work, which do not, and if so, what can be done to make them work. Current work is on wide-area programming with MPI and Java.