Interactive and Real-Time Applications on the EGEE Grid Infrastructure

Abstract

EGEE is currently the flagship European grid project having established the largest grid infrastructure worldwide. This infrastructure is routinely used on a daily basis by more than 13,000 users coming from a large number of scientific disciplines, including but not limited to high energy physics, fusion physics, computational chemistry, life sciences, earth sciences, astronomy, and astrophysics. Many of these grid-enabled applications require real-time interactions with the end users. This chapter presents the capabilities offered within EGEE for supporting interactive applications. More specifically, we will see that interactivity requires support from multiple layers of a grid architecture starting from the grid middleware itself, the grid site configuration, and the network infrastructure. Moreover, user- and VO-level solutions have been proposed to overcome limitations posed from the lower middleware layers. Lastly, we present a number of real-life applications exploiting interactivity on the EGEE grid.