Windows Condor Service

What is Condor?

Condor is a specialized workload management system for compute-intensive jobs to maximise throughput developed by the Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It allows users to submit jobs from their own machine to a networked pool of workstations. These workstations can be either dedicated computational resources or under-used machines sitting on people's desks. Condor provides a job queueing mechanism, scheduling policy, resource monitoring and resource management. Users submit their serial or parallel jobs to Condor, Condor places them into a queue, chooses when and where to run the jobs, carefully monitors their progress, and informs the user upon completion. Condor does not require a shared file system across machines - if no shared file system is available, Condor can transfer the job's data files on behalf of the user, or Condor may be able to transparently redirect all the job's I/O requests back to the submit machine. The Condor project pages offer a more detailed overview.

Condor at Southampton

The iSolutions HPC team has created, in partnership with the Department of Social Statistics and the Southampton regional e-Science centre, an MS Windows Condor Service. Generally speaking, this resource is best suited to users who:

  • Don't require access to third party software -- i.e. external packages and libraries. In due course we'll think though how best to enhance the service.
  • Run many short-medium length jobs, however this is not a prerequisite to the use of the pool. Note particularly that jobs run in the pool do not get pre-empted. Once your job has found a resource it will execute to completion.

Condor Resources

The Windows Condor Pool is currently runs Condor version 6.6.10 and is comprised of:

  • 1 Master node
    Dual processor P4 (1.5GHz) with 1 GB of Memory
  • The vast majority of the workstations in the public computing areas of the university. - This is in the region of 1400 workstations. If you wish to find out how you can contribute machines to the Condor pool with a minimal impact on your own use and positive benefits for your group, please contact Serviceline.