A practical problem faced by users of metacomputers and computational grids is: If my computation can move from one system to another, how can I ensure that my data will still be available to my computation? Depending on the level of software, technical, and administrative support available, a data grid or a distributed file system would be reasonable solutions. However, it is not always possible (or practical) to have a diverse group of systems administrators agree to adopt a common infrastructure to support remote data access. Yet, having transparent access to any remote data is an important, practical capability. We have developed the Trellis File System (Trellis FS) to allow programs to access data files on any file system and on any host on a network that can be named by a Secure Copy Locator (SCL) or a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Without requiring any new protocols or infrastructure, Trellis can be used on practically any POSIX-based system on the Internet. Read access, w...