Interactive and Real-Time Applications on the EGEE Grid Infrastructure

EGEE is currently the flagship European gridproject having established the largest gridinfrastructure 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 gridarchitecture starting from the grid middlewareitself, the gridsite configuration, and the network infrastructure. Moreover, user- and VO-level solutions have been proposed to overcome limitations posed from the lower middlewarelayers. Lastly, we present a number of real-life applications exploiting interactivity on the EGEE grid.