Interactivity on the Grid: Limitations and Opportunities

Grid computing has the intrinsic disadvantages of a batch system: the undetermined delay between the time a job is submitted and the time it is completed. Our approach to this problem is iGrid, a framework that proposes to change the Grid from a batch system to a more interactive distributed platform. Agents are deployed on nodes and wait to be contacted by an interactive job to start the computation, thus bypassing the regular Grid scheduler. A CPU fairshare mechanism allows users to get their fair iGrid machine share over a long period. Our prototype implementation scales to all 400 Grid nodes we were granted executing on top a software for data intensive parallel computing.