Interactive Grid Architecture for Application Service Providers

This paper presents our Interactive Grid architecture for Application Service Providers (I-GASP). We envision IGASP as a solution for making computers available primarily for interactive use in a grid computing environment. A user might access such a computer for running diverse applications such as graphics rendering, scientific visualization or mechanical CAD. I-GASP consists of a grid middleware for provisioning these computers, remote display technology that goes across firewalls and several techniques for making the computers suitable for use in a grid environment, namely controlled shell and desktop, dynamic accounts, admission control, and monitoring and management agents. To minimize the amount of user data that needs to migrate to the assigned computer before an interactive session begins, we present our affinity scheduling algorithm that favors a computer where the user has previously had an interactive session.