An environment for enabling interactive grids

Traditional use of grid computing allows a user to submit batch jobs in a grid environment. We believe, next generation grids will extend the application domain to include interactive graphical sessions. We term such grids interactive grids. In this paper, we describe some of the challenges involved in building interactive grids. These include fine grain access control, QoS guarantees, and dynamic account management. In order to architect interactive grids, we propose and describe I-GENV, an environment for enabling interactive grids. I-GENV consists of GISH-'Grid Interactive Shell', Controlled Desktop, SAC-'Session Admission Control' module, GMMA-'Grid Monitoring and Management Agents', System Policies, and Dynamic Account Manager. We also present our testbed implementation of I-GENV using and extending Globus Toolkit 2.0 for the Grid middleware infrastructure, and VNC as the remote display technology.