Condor -- Providing Transparent Access to Unutilized Workstations
Xander Evers
Condor is a facility for executing jobs on a pool of cooperating
workstations. Jobs are queued and will be executed remotely on
workstations at times when those workstation would otherwise be idle.
A transparent checkpointing mechanism is provided, and jobs migrate
from workstation to workstation without user intervention. Condor is
meant for long-running, compute-intensive jobs that require no user
interaction.
Examples of this kind of jobs are simulations and combinatoric
searches. Condor is freely available software, and runs on a variety
of architectures. It was developed at the Computer Science Department
of the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
In this talk we shall present an overview of the Condor system, and
where and how it can be used. We shall also look at some current
developments, such as flocking: sharing the load of jobs
across different Condor pools.