|
Home >
Research Support Group >
Condor > Introductory article
Hundreds of PC workstations are available for student use in the computing labs across the U of A campus.
Much of the time, however, these powerful machines sit idle, waiting to be used.
To Masao Fujinaga of the AICT Research Support Group,
that idle time is a valuable resource.
"In various student labs around campus, computers are not being used," says Fujinaga.
"There's a lot of computing power available there."
In the past, accessing that power has been difficult. Lab workstations must remain
available to students who need them for coursework. It's not easy to predict when they'll be
free for other uses, and for how long.
But now there's an answer to this problem. Named after the scavenging bird of the
California desert, "Condor" is a software application that searches for and utilizes unused
processing power on computing networks.
"Basically, Condor is a way of harvesting CPU cycles," says Fujinaga.
Condor can operate on any network of multi-tasking machines. It works by assigning one
computer on the network (the "central manager") the job of constantly scanning the others
for signs of inactivity.
When the central manager detects an idle workstation, it instantly transfers a computing
job to that machine for processing. If Condor detects keyboard or mouse activity on that machine,
the job is stopped until the workstation is idle again.
"It works like a screensaver," explains Fujinaga. "Any time a user sits down at a machine,
the Condor job goes to sleep."
The result is that lab workstations can do useful work with their unused cycles
without hindering the normal operation of the labs.
The new system represents a significant addition to AICT's research computing
facilities, says Fujinaga. So far, 74 workstations have been added to the Condor
network, and he hopes that number will soon grow to 200.
Best For Users With Many Small Jobs
However, Fujinaga points out that Condor will not be suitable for all users.
Unlike the systems maintained directly by the AICT Research Support Group (e.g., the
WestGrid SGI's or the AICT Linux cluster), lab workstations are switched off at night
and rebooted each day. Condor will also interrupt any research computing job when a
user sits down at the machine. The new system is therefore unsuitable for users
with long-running jobs, says Fujinaga.
"It's not a general-purpose machine," he says. "You need a particular kind of problem
to make this work. But it can be powerful for people with the right kinds of problems."
The ideal user, he says, will have a large number of short jobs to run. Image processing
or computer animation projects involving hundreds or thousands of images could be perfect
for Condor, for example.
"If you were to try to do these kinds of processes on a single workstation
it would take an awfully long time, but they're good candidates for this system,"
says Fujinaga.
Condor has been successfully used by many other institutions around the world,
he adds, noting that part of its attraction is its low cost. No new hardware is required,
and the Condor software itself is free.
"Technically, it's not that complicated a system to set up," says Fujinaga.
"Hopefully, it won't require a lot of supervision."
Campus researchers who want to use Condor should speak to AICT staff first, says
Fujinaga, primarily to make sure their software will run on the system.
"If your software applications are already running on Windows, it's not complicated
to adapt them to Condor," he says. "If they're not, it's more difficult."
For more information about the new Condor system, e-mail research.support@ualberta.ca
Updated: August 15, 2005.
|
