Abstract: Accessing the power of distributed resources can nowadays easily be done using a middleware based on a client/server approach. Several architectures exist for those middlewares. The most scalable ones rely on a hierarchical design. Determining the best shape for the hierarchy, the one giving the best throughput of services, is not an easy task. We first propose a computation and communication model for such hierarchical middleware. Our model takes into account the deployment of several services in the hierarchy. Then, based on this model, we propose an algorithm for automatically constructing a hierarchy. This algorithm aims at offering the users the best obtained to requested throughput ratio, while providing fairness on this ratio for the different kind of services, and using as few resources as possible. Finally, we compare our model with experimental results on a real middleware called DIET.