Method and apparatus for controlling the assignment of units of work to a workload enclave in a client/server system

A method and apparatus for controlling the assignment of units of work to workload enclaves in a client/server system in which units of work are organized into enclaves with the units of work in each enclave being managed as a single entity. Incoming work requests are queued for processing by one or more worker threads of one or more server processes. In response to the receipt of an incoming work request, a putwork() service of the operating system kernel defines an workload enclave for the work request and adds the work request to a queue of incoming work requests to enqueue the request. In response to a request from a worker thread for more work, a getwork() service of the operating system kernel removes a work request from the queue to dequeue the request and associates the worker thread with the enclave defined for the request. If a worker thread must create a new unit of work while processing a work request, it calls an appropriate service of the operating system kernel, which creates the new unit of work and associates the new process with the enclave of the worker thread. The worker thread is disassociated from the enclave upon completion of the work request.