STFC Condor Pool (External Pages)

What is the STFC Condor Pool?

The STFC Condor Pool is a heterogeneous collection of computing resources at both Daresbury and Rutherford Appleton Laboratories. Although there are a few dedicated machines in the pool, most of them are personal workstations running variants of Linux and Windows.

What is Condor?

Condor is a distributed High Throughput Computing (HTC) resource management system developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is used to utilise otherwise unused CPU cycles to execute submitted jobs in the background at a low-priority so that they do not interfere with a resource's normal workload. Submitted jobs are matched to appropriate machines capable of performing the calculation.

How heterogeneous is the pool?

The STFC pool consists of a wide variety of Linux and Windows machines. There are a total of 2 machines in the pool, of which 0 are setup for submission only. The remaining 1 execute machines run 1 different operating system variants on their 2 processors. This makes the pool especially useful for testing the portability of multi-platform build scripts.

Pool details

Further information on the pool is available on within STFC's internal web pages.

Presentations

"CONDOR as a resource for accelerator research ", 23rd Particle Accelerator Conference (PAC09), Vancouver
"Condor and the NGS", NGS Innovation Forum '08, Manchester
"Condor Gotchas III", Euro Condor Week 2008, Barcelona
"Condor Gotchas II (this time it's cynical!)", Paradyn/Condor Week 2007, Madison WI
"Heterogeneous Pools", 2nd European Condor Week 2006, Milan
"Condor Gotchas", 2nd European Condor Week 2006
"Defining a Campus Grid" A summary of the 2005 CampusGrid Meeting's working dinner on what is the difference between a Compute Pool and a Campus Grid.
"Caging the CCLRC Compute Zoo (Activities at CCLRC)", Paradyn/Condor Week 2005, Madison WI
"Condor: Firewall Mirroring", UK Condor Week 2004
"Condor: The CCLRC Experience", UK Condor Week 2004
"Introduction to Condor"

Documents

Current methods for negotiating firewalls for the Condor system: a paper for UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2005 (AHM 2005). [SLIDES]
The Use of Condor at CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory: an experience paper describing how Condor was setup at CCLRC.
Using Condor effectively in the presence of Personal Firewalls: a proposal on how to handle firewalls in a Condor Pool
Report on Condor Installation: describes the early investigations into Condor installation at Daresbury Laboratory.
Proposal for use of Condor at DL: definition of how we have setup Condor at CCLRC
User Introduction to the CCLRC Condor Pool: how to use Condor in the CCLRC

Projects

The following projects have been / are using / are expecting to use the STFC Condor Pool.

Build and Test test-bed for the ETF.
e-HTPX
GAMESS-UK
STFC Build and Test Service (speculative)