Ganga: a job management and optimising tool

Ganga, the job-management system (http://cern.ch/ganga), developed as an ATLAS- LHCb common project, offers a simple, effcient and consistent user experience in a variety of heterogeneous environments: from local clusters to global Grid systems. Ganga helps end-users to organise their analysis activities on the Grid by providing automatic persistency of the job's metadata. A user has full access to the job history including their configuration and input/output. It is however important that users can see a single environment for developing and testing algorithms locally and for running on large data samples on the Grid. The tool allows for some basic monitoring and a steadily increasing number of users of more than 300 users have been confirmed, both in HEP, as well as in non-HEP applications. The paper will introduce the Ganga philosophy, the Ganga architecture and current and future strategy.