Resource Management for Interactive Jobs in a Grid Environment

Most recent grid middleware technologies have been aimed at the execution of sequential batch jobs. However, some users require interactive access when running jobs on grid sites. Execution of these 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. We provide transparent and reliable support for such applications. Our solution, based on the notion of split execution and interposition agents, allows running applications on a remote machine while some I/O operations are sent back to a home machine. The paper describes how we have applied interposition agents transparently to interactive applications and also describes a simple multiprogramming mechanism that is used to start interactive applications as fast as possible even under heavy occupancy of resources. We provide a performance evaluation of the key elements involved in the execution of interactive jobs