Int.eu.Grid Project Approach on Supporting Interactive Applications in the Grid Environment

In this chapter we describe the Interactive European Grid project approach to handling interactive grid applications. Interactivity is an important feature that gives users the possibility to interact with applications in a natural way, giving the possibility to change parameters while the application is running. There are only few initiatives that address those issues in the grid environment. Execution of interactive applications on a grid environment is a challenging problem that requires the cooperation of several middleware tools and services. Additional problems arise when this interactive support is intended for parallel applications, which may run remotely across several sites. Our project aims to provide transparent and reliable support for such applications. We present the general architecture and interactive services, as well as technical details. We are proving its great added value and usefulness on a very demanding example. We also emphasize the open nature of the proposed solution and ready-to-use infrastructure, encouraging new applications and user communities to make use and profit of it. The int.eu.grid project supports interactive applications not only at the technical level. There is a special activity "Identification and Support for Interactive Grid-Enhanced Applications" that takes care of defining an adequate support in the e-Infrastructure for grid-enhanced interactive applications, so that the corresponding research communities can clearly benefit from the resources and mechanisms offered.