This paper reports the development of the Concerto platform, which is dedicated to supporting the deployment of parallel adaptive components on clusters of workstations. The current work aims at proposing a basic model of a parallel component, together with mechanisms and tools for managing the deployment of such a component. Another objective of this work is to define and implement a scheme that makes it possible for components to perceive their runtime environment. This environment is modelled as a set of resources. Any component can discover and monitor resources, using the services offered by the platform.