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In this position paper, we consider architectures of distributed interconnected clouds across geographically distributed, independently-administered storage and computation clusters. We consider two problems:federation of access across heterogeneous administrative domains, and computation jobs run over the wide area and heterogeneous data sets. We argue that a single, flexible architecture, analogous to the TCP/IP stack for networking, is sufficient to support these jobs, and outline its major elements. As with the networking stack, many elements are in place today to build an initial version of this architecture over existing facilities. With the sponsorship of the US National Science Foundation GENI project and the cooperation of the EU FIRE project, we are building an initial implementation, the TransCloud. We describe our initial results.