Responsiveness on the Interactive Grid

The Grid vision promises the secure and dynamicsharing of heterogeneous resources across the Internet. To datethe emphasis has been on supercomputing scenarios where arelatively long running job is submitted to the Grid, requiringlittle interaction with the end user. More recently, with theemerging aspirations of Grid aficionados to use it for a muchwider range of purposes – e-commerce and inter-enterprisecomputing for example – the issue of using the Grid fordistributed, highly interactive applications has been raised. Inour case this has emerged within a project seeking to build aEuropean Learning Grid Infrastructure† (ELeGI). DistributedLearning Environments need to be engaging and responsive, andas such it is important that, in addition to the dynamic resourcesharing, service-oriented model offered by the Grid, that it canalso meet the responsiveness needs of end users. In this paperwe extend earlier work on analysing delay in distributedinteractive applications to investigate the performance of theforemost Grid toolkit, Globus, in the context of distributedlearning