Abstract: In the current Grid environment, efficient workload
management presents a significant challenge, for which there are
exorbitant de facto standards encompassing resource discovery,
brokerage, and data transfer, among others. In addition, the real-time
resource status, essential for an optimal resource allocation strategy,
is often not readily accessible. To address these issues and provide a
cleaner abstraction of the Grid with the potential of generalizing into
arbitrary resource-sharing environment, this paper proposes a new
Condor-based pilot mechanism applied in the PanDA architecture,
PanDA-PF WMS, with the goal of providing a more generic yet
efficient resource allocating strategy. In this architecture, the PanDA
server primarily acts as a repository of user jobs, responding to pilot
requests from distributed, remote resources. Scheduling decisions are
subsequently made according to the real-time resource information
reported by pilots. Pilot Factory is a Condor-inspired solution for a
scalable pilot dissemination and effectively functions as a resource
provisioning mechanism through which the user-job server, PanDA,
reaches out to the candidate resources only on demand.