High Throughput Computing

The HTC Condor service is provided free of charge to staff (including associates) and postgraduate research students.

Registration is required to use Condor. 

The Condor service makes widespread use of classroom PCs located in teaching and learning centres across the campus (including some of the PCs in the libraries). Taken together, the PCs comprise the Condor pool. The size of the pool varies widely depending on time of day, day of the week and time of year but peaks at around 1900 cores.

Since each PC is configured to allow Condor jobs to run on each of the cores at the same time this gives a theoretical maximum capacity of 1900 Condor jobs running in parallel. Normally the figure will be much lower than this and may drop to around 600 during the summer vacation when some centres are closed for refurbishment or upgrades.

All of the Condor pool machines run the standard Managed Windows Service (MWS) based on the 64-bit version of Windows 7. A typical specification is:

• Intel Corei3 (quad-core) processor running at 3.3 GHz
• 8 GB of installed memory
• 120 GB of disk space

For further details visit the dedicated Condor service website at condor.liv.ac.uk.