We consider the use of a cluster system for Application Service Provider (ASP). In the ASP context, hosted applications and
databases can be update- intensive and must remain autonomous. In this paper, we propose a new solution for parallel processing
with autonomous databases, using a replicated database organization. The main idea is to allow the system administrator to
control the tradeoff between database consistency and application performance. Application requirements are captured through
execution rules stored in a shared directory. They are used (at run time) to allocate cluster nodes to user requests in a
way that optimizes load balancing while satisfying application consistency requirements. We also propose a new preventive
replication method and a transaction load balancing architecture which can trade-off consistency for performance using execution
rules. Finally, we discuss the on-going implementation at LIP6 using a Linux cluster running Oracle 8i.