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Summary: Distributed Computing
in Practice:
The Condor Experience
Douglas Thain, Todd Tannenbaum, and Miron Livny
Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison
1210 West Dayton Street, Madison WI 53706
SUMMARY
Since 1984, the Condor project has enabled ordinary users to do extraordinary
computing. Today, the project continues to explore the social and technical problems
of cooperative computing on scales ranging from the desktop to the world-wide
computational grid. In this chapter, we provide the history and philosophy of the Condor
project and describe how it has interacted with other projects and evolved along with the
field of distributed computing. We outline the core components of the Condor system
and describe how the technology of computing must correspond to social structures.
Throughout, we reflect on the lessons of experience and chart the course traveled by
research ideas as they grow into production systems.
key words: Condor, grid, history, community, planning, scheduling, split execution
1. Introduction
Ready access to large amounts of computing power has been a persistent goal of computer
scientists for decades. Since the 1960s, visions of computing utilities as pervasive and as
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