F. M. Brochu

Ganga: User-friendly Grid job submission and management tool for LHC and beyond

Ganga has been widely used for several years in ATLAS, LHCb and a handful of other communities. Ganga provides a simple yet powerful interface for submitting and managing jobs to a variety of computing backends. The tool helps users configuring applications and keeping track of their work. With the major release of version 5 in summer 2008, Gangas main user-friendly features have been strengthened. Examples include a new configuration interface, enhanced support for job collections, bulk operations and easier access to subjobs. In addition to the traditional batch and Grid backends such as Condor, LSF, PBS, gLite/EDG a point-to-point job execution via ssh on remote machines is now supported. Ganga is used as an interactive job submission interface for end-users, and also as a job submission component for higher-level tools. For example GangaRobot is used to perform automated, end-to-end testing of distributed data analysis. Ganga comes with an extensive test suite covering more than 350 test cases. The development model involves all active developers in the release management shifts which is an important and novel approach for the distributed software collaborations. Ganga 5 is a mature, stable and widely-used tool with long-term support from the HEP community.

Key developments of the Ganga task-management framework

Ganga is the main end-user distributed analysis tool for the ATLAS and LHCb experiments and provides the foundation layer for the HammerCloud system, used by the LHC experiments for validation and stress testing of their numerous distributed computing facilities. Here we illustrate recent developments and demonstrate how tools that were initially developed for a specific user community have been migrated into the Ganga core, and so can be exploited by a wider user-base. Similarly, examples will be given where Ganga components have been adapted for use by communities in their custom analysis packages.