GANGA: powerful job submission and management tool

The computational and storage capability of the Grid are attracting several research communities, also beyond HEP. Ganga is a lightweight Grid job management tool developed at CERN. It is a key component in the distributed Data Analysis for ATLAS and LHCb. Ganga`s open and general framework allows to plug-in applications, which has attracted users from other domains outside HEP. In addition, Ganga interfaces to a variety of Grid and non-Grid backends using the same, simple end-user interface Ganga has already gained widespread use, the incomplete list of applications using Ganga include: Imaging processing and classification (developed by Cambridge Ontology Ltd.), Theoretical physics (Lattice QCD, Feynman-loop evaluation), Bio-informatics (Avian Flu Data Challenge), Geant4 (Monte Carlo package), HEP data analysis (ATLAS, LHCb). All these communities have different goals and requirements and the main challenge is the creation of a standard and general software infrastructure for the immersion of these communities onto the Grid. This general infrastructure is effectively "shielding" the applications from the details of the Grid. Finally, it is flexible and general enough to match the requirements of the different productions without including mayor changes in the design of the tool. Ganga supports a large number of backends without the underlying knowledge of each one: EGEE gLite and NorduGrid ARC middlewares, Condor and Cronus (Condor/G), various batch systems, etc From January to end of 2007 Ganga has been used by around 1000 users and has been installed locally in more than 50 sites around the world. Recently also the educative aspect of Ganga has been recognized and Ganga has become a part of the official EGEE tutorials. Contrary to other portals or tools, Ganga is not limited to specific VOs or infrastructures allowing new users to quickly exploit the EGEE infrastructure. It also allows for the interoperability of various Grid backends. Ganga has demonstrated to be a powerful job submission tool able to allow a fast merge of any new community onto the Grid. Its value has been demonstrated also by HEP communities that have adopted Ganga as the submission tool for their productions. In the new phase of the EGEE project the fast immersion of new communities will continue being a central goal and we will continue working for the confirmation of Ganga as the Gridification tool for new communities.