An architecture for interaction

More generally, the massive use of computing power today is interactive desktop computing. Can the grid metaphor apply not only to factories - large virtual organizations - , but also to light bulbs - the individual interactive user -, when the power of the grid is required?

The focus is Short Deadline Jobs (SDJ): SDJ have a soft deadline, are composed of a large number of very fine-grained tasks. Moreover, they may imply interaction in the strong sense, where actions on a front-end impact the grid computation.

Scheduling SDJ on a grid has some relations with processor time sharing, or network differentiated services, but without the fundamental capacity of strong preemption due to processor time-slices or network packets: a batch job cannot in general be checkpointed, and lately restarted.

The architecture includes agent scheduling, to cope with the submission penalty; permanent reservation on virtual processors and site access control, enabling resource sharing orthogonal to VO policies ; task prioritization in order to approximate time-slice based SRTS policies; and fully decentralized access control.

An implementation of SDJ is ongoing on EGEE, with a dedicated Working Group.