Distributed computing is a means to overcome the limitations of single computing systems. In this paper we describe how clusters of heterogeneous supercomputers can be used to run a single application or a set of applications. We concentrate on the communication problem in such a configuration and present a software library called PACX-MPI that was developed to allow a single system image from the point of view of an MPI programmer. We describe the concepts that have been implemented for heterogeneous clusters of this type and give a description of real applications using this library.