The gLite Workload Management System

The gLite Workload Management System represents a key entry point to high-end services available on a Grid. Being designed as part of the european Grid within the six years long EU-funded EGEE project, now at its third phase, the WMS is meant to provide reliable and efficient distribution and management of end-user requests. This service basically translates user requirements and preferences into specific operations and decisions - dictated by the general status of all other Grid services - while taking responsibility to bring requests to successful completion. The WMS has become a reference implementation of the ”early binding” approach to meta-scheduling as a neat, Grid-aware solution, able to optimise resource access and to satisfy requests for computation together with data. Several added value features are provided for job submission, different job types are supported from simple batch to a variety of compounds. In this paper we outline what has been achieved to provide adequate workload and management components, suitable to be deployed in a production-quality Grid, while covering the design and development of the gLite WMS and focusing on the most recently achieved results