About BoilerGrid

Condor is one of several distributed computing resources RCAC provides. Like other similar resources, Condor provides a framework for running programs on otherwise idle computers. While this has serious limitations for parallel jobs and codes with serious IO or memory requirements, Condor can provide a large quantity of cycles for researchers who need to run hundreds of smaller jobs.

Currently Condor is used to collect idle cycles on all Linux computational resources RCAC maintains. All of these resources are scheduled with PBS, but when no PBS job is running on a given node it is free to execute Condor jobs. When PBS elects to run a new job on such a node any active Condor job is immediately checkpointed (if possible) and removed from the node. Condor on Linux clusters provides approximately 8500 cores to BoilerGrid.

In addition, BoilerGrid includes approximately 5000 Windows cores from labs operated by IT Teaching and Learning Technologies, and several hundred from research labs and workstations around the West Lafayette campus.

Carol X. Song, senior research scientist in the Rosen Center and principal investigator for TeraGrid at Purdue, says that more than 6,400 computers of all sizes — from desktop machines used by students to do homework and check e-mail, up to large, powerful research computers — are linked together using the open source application Condor.

The latest addition of more than 2,200 machines to the Condor pool includes 1,000 computer lab machines on the West Lafayette campus, 300 computer lab machines on the Purdue Calumet campus, 300 workstations at the University of Notre Dame campus, and 664 processors in a cluster maintained for research computing at the Rosen Center in West Lafayette.

Miron Livny, professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin, says that Purdue's Condor pool is the largest in the nation.

“Other campuses should follow Purdue's leadership," Livny says. “I believe this is the right way for us to move forward, get organized and get resources together, and then go out on the national level and share resources with other institutions."

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Rosen Center for Advanced Computing

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