What's new with Condor?

(April 1, 2008) Condor 7.1.0 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 7.1.0 (not to be confused with our recent stable series release 7.0.1). This development series release introduces several new features. The condor_startd can be configured to fetch jobs from other sources using a simple plug-in mechanism. A new daemon condor_job_router has been added for dynamically transforming suitable Vanilla Universe jobs into Grid Universe jobs. DAGMan's handling of rescue DAGs has been improved to better support nested DAGs. DAGIrl has been added to better support Irl workflows in the beginning of April. See the Version History for a complete list of changes. Condor 7.1.0 binaries and source code are available from our Downloads page.

(March 29, 2008) Nature publishes virus views enabled using Purdue's Condor flock

As published in the Feb 28th issue of Nature, a team led by a Purdue University researcher has achieved images of a virus in detail two times greater than had previously been achieved. This breakthrough was enabled through the use of Purdue's Condor distributed computing grid, which comprises more than 7,000 computers.

(March 8, 2008) Milwaukee Institute seeks to build computational power

Private sector leaders in Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin are trying to bridge the gap between universities and businesses through more effective use of computing and scientific resources, and their vehicle is the new Milwaukee Institute, a non-profit organization that is building a cyber infrastructure of shared, grid-based computing that leverages Condor Project technology.

(February 27, 2008) Condor 7.0.1 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 7.0.1. This release introduces several fixes for bugs, including security-related problems and a new port to Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.0. See the Version History for a complete list of changes. Condor 7.0.1 binaries and source code are available from our Downloads page.

(January 22, 2008) Condor 7.0.0 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 7.0.0. This first release in a new stable series includes all new features added in the 6.9 development series. See the Version History for a complete list of changes. Condor 7.0.0 binaries and source code are available from our Downloads page.

(December 20, 2007) Condor 6.8.8 released!

The Condor Team announces the release of Condor 6.8.8. Condor 6.8.8 introduces several fixes for bugs, including a security-related problem. See the Version History for a complete list of changes. Condor 6.8.8 is available from our Downloads page.

(December 4, 2007) Red Hat Enterprise MRG distributed computing platform announced

Today Red Hat announced Red Hat Enterprise MRG, a distributed computing platform offering that utilizes Condor for workload management. "The University of Wisconsin is pleased to work with Red Hat around the Condor project," said Terry Millar, Associate Dean at the UW-Madison Graduate School.

(November 30, 2007) Condor 6.8.7 released!

The Condor Team announces the release of Condor 6.8.7. Condor 6.8.7 introduces several fixes for bugs. See the Version History for a complete list of changes. Condor 6.8.7 is available from our Downloads page.

(November 28, 2007) Condor 6.9.5 released!

The Condor Team announces the release of Condor 6.9.5. Condor 6.9.5 highlights include numerous scalability and performance improvements, updates between the starter and startd which allow more accurate job eviction policies, enhancements to Condor's privilege separation, and numerous bug fixes including a critical bug in standard universe introduce in 6.9.4 that could result in data corruption of binary files. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details and a complete list of changes. Condor 6.9.5 is available from our Downloads page.

(November 19, 2007) Condor-G and GT4 Tutorial

Jan Ploski offers this tutorial documentation for Condor-G GT4 administrators and end users (those submitting jobs).

(November 6, 2007) Purdue University becomes an HPC-Ops center

As described in the HPCwire press release, Purdue University is to become one of five High Performance Computing Operations (HPC-Ops) centers within the NSF-funded Teragrid project. Purdue has the largest academic Condor pool in the world, which provides computing cycles to Teragrid.

(October 22, 2007) "Clemson corrals idle computers"

"When all the Clemson University students are tucked in for the night, hundreds of desktops across the campus are turned on to create a supercomputing grid that can rapidly process large amounts of data." "Her request for a series of computations that would have taken 10 years on a regular desktop computer was completed in just a few days."

(October 19, 2007) Serious bug in v6.9.4 impacts standard universe jobs

A bug introduced in the most recent developer release, Condor v6.9.4, can cause jobs running in Condor's Standard Universe to write corrupt data. The Condor Team has written a patch that will be included in v6.9.5 which is forthcoming; if you need the patch sooner, please contact us. This bug only impacts jobs that write binary (non-ASCII) files and are submitted to the Standard Universe.

(October 15, 2007) High Throughput Computing Week

High Throughput Computing Week in Edinburgh is a four-day event in November 2007 that will discuss several aspects of high throughput computing (HTC), including transforming a task so it can benefit from HTC and choosing technologies to deliver HTC, as well as trying some HTC systems in-person. Condor will be one of the four technologies discussed. More Details

(Sept 18, 2007) Condor 6.8.6 released!

The Condor Team announces Condor 6.8.6. This new stable series release fixes numerous bugs, faster submission to Globus WS-GRAM, and also adds official support for Microsoft Vista and MacOS 10.4 on Intel CPUs. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.8.6 is available from our Downloads page.

(September 14, 2007) "Cardiff supplies UK National Grid Service with first Windows Condor Pool"

Cardiff University announces the availability of a 1,000 processor Condor Pool to the UK National Grid Service. "Use by the University's researchers has grown considerably in this time and has saved local researchers years of time in processing their results." "Using Gasbor to build a model of a typical Tropoelastin molecule takes 30 hours. Using Condor the same simulation ran in just two hours."

(August 29, 2007) Condor 6.9.4 released!

The Condor Team announces the release of Condor 6.9.4. Condor 6.9.4 highlights include a new implementation of Quill that can store more information than ever before into a relational database, a new job type (universe) enabling jobs to utilize VMWare and Xen virtual machines, and some performance improvements. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.9.4 is available from our Downloads page.

(July 12, 2007) More secure configuration for PostgreSQL and Quill documented

When Quill was first developed, it was designed to work with older versions of the PostgreSQL database server. Newer versions of PostgreSQL have stronger security features, which can be enabled in the PostgreSQL configuration, requiring no changes to the Quill daemon. We recommend that all Quill sites upgrade to the latest version of PostgreSQL (8.2), and make these easy changes to their PostgreSQL configuration. The consequences of not doing so mean that any user who can sniff the network between the Quill daemon and the PostgreSQL server can obtain the Quill database password, and make changes to the Quill database. This can change the output of condor_q and condor_history, but cannot otherwise impact Condor's correctness or security. Otherwise unauthorized users cannot use this database password to run jobs or mutate Condor's configuration. A second problem with the previously recommended configuration was that any user with the publicly-available read-only Quill PostgreSQL password could create new tables in the database and store information there. While this does not effect the running of Condor in any way, sites may view that as a security problem. As of Condor 6.8.6 and 6.9.4, the Condor manual has been updated to describe the more secure installation of PostgreSQL, which remedy both of the above problems. These changes include the following: Change the authentication method (the final field) in the pg_hba.conf file from "password" to "md5". Restarting PostgreSQL is then needed for this to take effect. Only allow the quillwriter account to create tables. To do this, run the following two SQL commands as the database owner. REVOKE CREATE on SCHEMA public FROM PUBLIC; GRANT CREATE on SCHEMA public to quillwriter;

(July 5, 2007) Durham University Department of Geography flies with Condor

In 2006 the Durham University Department of Geography began examining ways of increasing the speed at which research results could be obtained from geophysical modelling simulations. After a period of testing lasting over 6 months, the Department of Geography has successfully implemented a distributed computing system built upon the Condor platform. Since its implementation, the Condor distributed computing network has provided a unique facility for spatial modelling which is particularly suited to Monte Carlo approaches. Thanks to the processing power offered by the Condor network, members of the Catchment, River and Hillslope Science (CRHS) group have developed methods of ultra-high resolution image processing and remote sensing which are pushing the traditional boundaries of ecological monitoring at both catchment and local scales.

(June 14, 2007) Condor 6.9.3 released!

The Condor Team is relieved to announce the release of Condor 6.9.3. Condor 6.9.3 has significant performance and scalability improvements and many other new features. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.9.3 is available from our Downloads page.

(May 17, 2007) Condor 6.8.5 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.8.5. Condor 6.8.5 is primarily a bugfix release. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.8.5 is available from our Downloads page.

(May 2007) BAE Systems incorporating Condor into their SOCET SET v5.4 release

BAE Systems produces geospacial exploitation tools. The GXP Mosaic News and Updates hints at using Condor for complex TFRD decompression and VQ compression tasks, as well as the multi-CPU processing of orthomosaics.

(May 3, 2007) Condor Week 2007 Concludes

After four days of presentations, tutorials, and discussion sessions, Condor Week 2007 came to a close. Red Hat presented plans to integrate Condor into Red Hat and Fedora distributions, and to provide enterprise-level support for Condor installations. Government labs reported results from their deployment efforts over the past year; for example, a production Condor installation at Brookhaven National Labs consisting of over 4800 machines ran 2.8 million jobs in the past 3 months, delivering 6.2 million wallclock hours to over 400 scientists. IBM reported on an ongoing project to bring Condor and Blue Gene technologies together, in order to enable High Throughput style computing on IBM's popular Blue Gene supercomputer. The Condor Team reported on the scalability enhancements in the Condor 6.9 development series. Check out the 35+ presentations delivered this week.

(April 30, 2007) Condor helps Clemson University researchers

GRIDtoday reports in the article "Clemson Researchers Get Boost From Condor" that Clemson University has deployed a campuswide computing grid built on Condor. "'The Condor grid has enabled me to conduct my research, without a doubt,' [Assistant Professor] Kurz said. 'Before using the campus grid, I was completely without hope of completing the computational studies that my research required. As soon as I saw hundreds of my jobs running on the campus grid, I started sending love notes to the Condor team at Clemson.'"

(April 10, 2007) Condor 6.9.2 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.9.2. Condor 6.9.2 contains all bugfixes from the recent 6.8.4 release and adds several new features. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.9.2 is available from our Downloads page.

(April 3, 2007) International Summer School in Grid Computing

The fifth in the highly successful series of International Summer Schools in Grid Computing will be held at Gripsholmsviken Hotell & Konferens of Mariefred, Sweden, near Stockholm, from 8th to 20th July 2007. The school builds on the integrated curriculum developed over the last few years which brings together the leading grid technologies from around the world, presented by leading figures, and gives students a unique opportunity to study these technologies in depth side by side. More information

(March 15, 2007) Condor Week 2007 Schedule posted

A first draft of the Condor Week 2007 schedule has been posted on the Condor/Paradyn Week 2007 page. The schedule has not been finalized, but it is close.

(February 5, 2007) Condor 6.8.4 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.8.4. Condor 6.8.4 is primarily a bugfix release, including fixes in Quill, DAGMan, and the "local universe". See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.8.4 is available from our Downloads page.

(January 15, 2007) Condor used in search for alternate fuel sources

GRIDtoday reports in the article "Protein Wranglers" that NCSA researchers are using Condor-G to streamline their workflow. "They were spending quite a bit of time doing relatively trivial management tasks, such as moving data back and forth, or resubmitting failed jobs,' says Kufrin. After gaining familiarity with the existing 'human-managed' tasks that are required to carry out lengthy, computationally intensive simulations of this nature, the team identified Condor-G, an existing, proven Grid-enabled implementation of Condor, as a possible solution."

(January 10, 2007) Condor 6.9.1 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.9.1. Condor 6.9.1 contains all bugfixes from the recent 6.8.3 release and adds several new features, including numerous performance improvements and improved GCB support. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.9.1 is available from our Downloads page.

(January 8, 2007) Condor 6.8.3 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.8.3. Condor 6.8.3 fixes a number of bugs, adds several minor features, and adds clipped support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on PowerPCs. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.8.3 is available from our Downloads page.

(December 2006) "Purdue doubles the work life of computers with overtime"

Purdue University distributes its computing jobs across the university using Condor. "At Purdue, we're harvesting computer downtime and putting it to good use" says Gerry McCartney, Purdue's interim vice president for information technology and chief information officer.

(November 2006) Condor in production at Banesto, a major bank in Spain

Banesto is Spain's third largest bank in volume of managed resources, and caters to over 3,000,000 customers. With the help of Cediant, Banesto has installed a Condor cluster to replace the work previously performed by a monolithic SMP. As a result, the time it takes to evaluate each portifolio has been reduced by 75%. Read more in an announcement made on the condor-users email list.

(November 2006) Condor's role in "The Wild"

You may have heard about the fantastic computer animation in "The Wild", a Disney film that appeared in theaters last Spring and was recently released on DVD. What you may not have heard is that Condor was used to assist with the tremendous effort of managing over 75 million renders. Read a nice letter we received from Leo Chan and Jason Stowe, film Technology Supervisor and Condor Lead, respectively.

(October 2006) Linux Journal Magazine publishes article "Getting Started with Condor"

Author Irfan Habib wrote in Linux Journal magazine his experience getting started with Condor. He concludes, "Condor provides the unique possibility of using our current computing infrastructure and investments to target processing of jobs that are simply beyond the capabilities of our most powerful systems... Condor is not only a research toy, but also a piece of robust open-source software that solves real-world problems."

(October 26, 2006) Condor 6.9.0 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.9.0. Condor 6.9.0 is the first release of a new development series based on the 6.8.x stable code. The primary new feature in 6.9.0 is initial support for privledge separation using glexec. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. As a development release, 6.9.0 is not recommended for production use. Condor 6.9.0 is available from our Downloads page.

(October 16, 2006) Condor 6.8.2 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.8.2. Condor 6.8.2 release fixes a number of bugs and adds support for x86_64 standard universe. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.8.2 is available from our Downloads page.

(September 2006) UW-Madison plays a central role in "Open Science Grid" (OSG)

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science announced today that they have joined forces to fund a five-year, million program to operate and expand upon the two-year-old national grid. This project collectively taps into the power of thousands of processors distributed across more than 30 participating universities and federal research laboratories. UW-Madison computer scientist Miron Livny, leader of the Condor Project, is principal investigator of OSG and will be in charge of building, maintaining, and coordinating software activities. [OSG Press Release][DDJ Article][Badger Herald Article]

(September 19, 2006) Condor 6.8.1 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.8.1. Condor 6.8.1 release fixes a number of important bugs, including some potential security vulnerabilities. All users are encouraged to upgrade immediately. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.8.1 is available from our Downloads page.

(September 2006) "Setting up a Condor cluster" at Linux.com

Author M. Shuaib Khan offers a brief introduction to setting up Condor at Linux.com. He writes, "Condor is a powerful yet easy-to-use software system for managing a cluster of workstations."

(July 2006) IBM publishes article "Manage grid resources with Condor web services"

IBM developerWorks has published a very nice tutorial on using Condor's web services interface (Birdbath). Jeff Mausolf, IBM Application Architect, states "This tutorial is intended to introduce the Web services interface of Condor. We'll develop a Java technology-based Web services client and demonstrate the major functions of Condor exposed to clients through Web services. The Web services client will submit, monitor, and control jobs in a Condor environment."

(July 2006) Condor 6.8.0 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.8.0. Condor 6.8.0 begins a new stable series of Condor and contains the new features and bug fixes from the Condor 6.7 development series. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.8.0 is available from our Downloads page.

(June 2006) Condor 6.7.20 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.20. This release features many bugfixes and new features, including a variety of built-in functions that can be used in ClassAds and a unified mapfile providing more flexible identity management when using strong authentication. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.7.20 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.20 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(June 2006) Condor used to research genetic diseases

"Sleeping Computers Unravel Genetic Diseases." "Now, with the help of the Condor middleware system, Superlink-Online is running in parallel on 200 computers at the Technion and 3,000 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison." "'Over the last half year, dozens of geneticists around the world have used Superlink-Online, and thousands of runs – totaling 70 computer years – have been recorded,' says Professor Assaf Schuster, head of the Technion’s Distributed Systems Laboratory, which developed Superlink-Online’s computational infrastructure."

(May 2006) "UW holds Condor meeting"

The Wisconsin State Journal briefly covered Condor Week 2006. "Condor gives UW-Madison a real edge in any competitive research, including physics, biotechnology, chemistry and engineering, said Guri Sohi, computer sciences department chairman."

(May 2006) Registration open for European Condor Week 2006, June 26-29, Milan, Italy

Registration is now open for European Condor Week 2006. This second European Condor Week is a four day event that gives Condor collaborators and users in the chance to exchange ideas and experiences, learn about latest research, signup for detailed tutorials, and celebrate 10 years of collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison Condor Team and the Italian Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN - the National Institute of Nuclear Physics). Please join us!

(May 2006) Condor 6.7.19 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.19. This release features an important security fix to checkpoint server, submission to PBS and LSF systems, ClassAd functions, and many other improvements. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.7.19 is available from our Downloads page. We strongly recommend sites running earlier versions of Condor in the 6.7 development series upgrade to 6.7.19 as soon as feasible. We believe 6.7.19 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(April 2006) A Peek into Micron's Grid Infrastructure

In an interview for GRIDtoday, Brooklin Gore discusses Micron's Condor-based grid. Gore's comments included "We have 11 'pools' (individual grids, all connected via a LAN or WAN) comprising over 11,000 processors at seven sites in four countries. We selected the Condor High Throughput Computing system because it ran on all the platforms we were interested in, met our configuration needs, was widely used and open source yet well supported."

(March 2006) Condor 6.7.18 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.18. This release features important security fixes and many other improvements. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.7.18 is available from our Downloads page. We strongly recommend sites running earlier versions of Condor in the 6.7 development series upgrade to 6.7.18 as soon as feasible. We believe 6.7.18 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(March 2006) Condor 6.6.11 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.6.11. Version 6.6.11 is strictly for bug and security fixes. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.6.11 is available from our Downloads page.

(March 2006) Simulating Supersymmetry with Condor

An article in Science Grid This Week describes how Condor combined with resources from the Open Science Grid and the Univ of Wisconsin Condor Pool provided over 215 CPU years in less than two months towards a discovery eagerly anticipated by particle physicists around the world.

(March 2006) GAMS and Condor

A recent advertisement for GAMS, (a high-level modeling system for mathematical programming problems) features Condor.

(March 2006) Announcing the International Summer School on Grid Computing 2006

If you are interested in learning about grid technology (including Condor) from leading authorities in the field, we encourage you to investigate the International Summer School on Grid Computing. The School will include lectures on the principles, technologies, experience and exploitation of Grids. Lectures will also review the research horizon and report recent significant successes. Lectures will be given in the mornings. In the afternoons the practical exercises will take place on the equipment installed at the School site in Ischia, Italy (near Naples). The work will be challenging but rewarding.

(February 2006) Condor 6.7.17 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.17. This release features direct support for running backfill computations on unused nodes, parallel job support in DAGMan, improvements to condor_history, and many other improvements. See the Version History and Release Notes for further details. Condor 6.7.17 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.17 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(February 2006) Digital Aerial Solutions (DAS) uses Condor

to help increase image processing capacity, as detailed in this Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging press release.

(February 2006) "Communicating outside the flock, Part 2: Integrate grid resources with Condor-G plus Globus Toolkit" at IBM's developerWorks

IBM IT Architect Jeff Mausolf writes, "The Globus Toolkit provides a grid security infrastructure. By augmenting this infrastructure with the job submission, management, and control features of Condor, we can create a grid that extends beyond the Condor pool to include resources controlled by a number of resource managers, such as LoadLeveler, Platform LSF or PBS."

(February 2006) Condor 6.7.16 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.16. This is a bugfix release for 6.7.15. Together, these two releases include a faster negotiation protocol, a clipped port for PowerPC under YellowDog Linux 3.0, and many other improvements. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.16 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.16 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(January 2006) New ETICS project to improve quality

The goal of the ETICS (eInfrastructure for Testing, Integration and Configuration of Software) project is to improve the quality of Grid and distributed software by offering a practical quality assurance process to software projects, based on a build and test service. Please see the news release.

(January 2006) GLOW Brings Grids to Campus

Read about GLOW in Science Grid This Week.

(December 2005) Formation of a Condor Enterprise Users Group

Enterprise users of Condor are joining together to form a group. If you are a business user of Condor you may be interested to learn that an effort is underway to form a Condor Enterprise Users Group. The goal of this community is to: 1- Focus on the unique needs of enterprise/commercial/business users of Condor; 2- Share best practices in the enterprise Grid computing space; 3- Collaborate on Condor features needed to better support the enterprise space; 4- Discuss ways to support the Condor project for enterprise-focused activities. To learn more, read the announcement posted to the condor-users list. Subscribe to the group at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/mail-lists/.

(December 2005) Condor 6.7.14 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.14. Highlights include grid universe support for NorduGrid and Unicore, system job policy expressions, and job start time deferral. Users of prior version of 6.7.x are encouraged to upgrade. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.14 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.14 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(December 2005) "Communicating outside the flock, Part 1: Condor-G with Globus" at IBM's developerWorks

IBM IT Architect Jeff Mausolf writes, "In this article, we will look at how you can use Condor to simplify the tasks associated with job submission, monitoring, and control in a Globus environment. In Part 2, we will look at how you can use Condor's matchmaking to make intelligent scheduling decisions based on job requirements and resource information, and then leverage the remote resource access capabilities provided by Globus to submit jobs to resources that are not part of the Condor pool." Also available is "Part 2: Integrate grid resources with Condor-G plus Globus Toolkit."

(November 2005) " Peak Perfomance"

This article by Robert Regis Hyle on the National Underwriter Company technical news page highlights grid usage for life insurance and annuity carriers.

(November 2005) "Building a Linux cluster on a budget" from Linux.com

Article author Bruno Gonçalves says "By adding the Condor clustering software we turn this set of machines into a computing cluster that can perform high-throughput scientific computation on a large scale."

(November 2005) Condor 6.7.13 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.13. Highlights include Generic Connection Brokering for traversing firewalls and private networks, Quill on Windows, and a new clipped port for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 on IA64. Users of prior version of 6.7.x are encouraged to upgrade. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.13 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.13 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(October 2005) Press release from Canadian environmental minister

entitled "Minister Dion Launches WindScope To Support Government's Wind Energy Commitment". The new WindScope software that utilizes Condor allows users to determine the ideal location to install wind turbines.

(October 2005) See Jeff Vance's article "Finding the Business Case for Grids"

in the CIO Update for a discussion of The Hartford's recent work with Condor. Chris Brown, director of advanced technologies at Hartford Life said, "But the alternatives were expensive, and the ability to scale with a grid was much better," and "It wasn't the principal reason we for building our grid, but versus a more conventional solution, the grid has saved us millions of dollars."

(September 2005) Condor 6.7.12 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.12. This version is being released to fix several critical bugs in Condor 6.7.11. 6.7.11 was not widely advertised, but was available on our mirror site for a short period. Any users of 6.7.11, or any other prior version of 6.7.x are urged to upgrade. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.12 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.12 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(September 2005) Condor 6.7.11 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.11. This version is primarily for Quill. Quill maintains a read-only mirror of the job queue in a database, enabling faster and more powerful queries as well as reducing the load on the schedd. In addition, there were a number of bug fixes. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.11 contained several critical bugs and was pulled from the mirror site. Interested users should try 6.7.12 instead.

(September 2005) Korea's Grid Middleware Center uses Condor

(September 2005) " Reinventing Enterprise Technology"

This article in eWEEK.com by Peter Coffee discusses real problems and solutions to data and system challenges in academic and commercial research.

(August 2005) Read about "The Sweet Sound of Grid Computing"

in Brooklin Gore's article in Grid Today.

(August 2005) Grid Computing with Condor in the insurance industry

This cover story in TechDecisions for Insurance magazine profiles experiences of organizations in the insurance industry with Condor and grid computing.

(August 2005) Condor provides cycles to the TeraGrid at RCAC

This TeraGrid press release explains how the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) at Purdue University has opened up access to 11 teraflops of computing power to the TeraGrid community by using Condor.

(August 2005) Optena launches a Condor Knowledge Base and Support Site

Optena Corporation has recently announced on the Condor-Users Mail List the launching of a Condor Knowledge Base and Support web site, for use by the entire Condor community.

(August 2005) Condor 6.7.10 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.10. This version is primarily for bug fixes, including a number of serious bugs the Windows port. Many of the bugs were recently introduced in the 6.7 development series, so users of the 6.6 stable series need not upgrade. Users of prior versions of 6.7.x are urged to upgrade. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.10 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.10 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(July 2005) the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing

Read about the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) at Purdue University in the Teragrid news release.

(July 2005) "Twenty Years of Condor" by Katie Yurkewicz highlights Condor.

In Science Grid This Week: "The Condor idea, which had its root in Livny's Ph.D. research on distributed computing systems, is that users with computing jobs to run and not enough resources on their desktop should be connected to available resources in the same room or across the globe."

(July 2005) Condor is even in the Wikipedia

(July 2005) Condor 6.7.9 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.9. This version is primarily for the new parallel universe, but also includes many bug fixes and improvements to Condor-C. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.9 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.9 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(June 2005) Condor 6.6.10 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.6.10. Version 6.6.10 is strictly for bug fixes. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.6.10 is available from our Downloads page.

(June 2005) Condor 6.7.8 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.8. 6.7.8 is primarily for bug fixes, but includes some scalability additions for DAGMan and the Standard Universe. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.8 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.8 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases.

(June 2005) In the NetworkWorld newsletter

the article by Jennifer Stong-Michas highlights grid computing successes and difficulties, beginning with quotes from Hartford Life.

(June 2005) Alain Roy is in the news.

"Alain Roy: Providing Virtually Foolproof Middleware Access," by Katie Yurkewicz in Science Grid This Week profiles Condor staff member Alain Roy.

(May 2005) Read "Coraid in Hungarian Grid Project"

This article in Byte and Switch mentions that the Hungarian ClusterGrid Project is using Condor's flocking support.

(May 2005) GLOW

The Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW) is in the news. Read about it in News@UW-Madison and the EurekAlert press release.

(May 2005) Condor 6.7.7 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.7. 6.7.7 is primarily for improvements to the grid universe. It includes support for strong authentication and multiple users for the "condor" gridtype, and full support for the Globus Toolkit 4.0.0 release. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.7 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.7 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases. 6.7.6 users who are using the Globus Toolkit 4.0 are strongly urged to upgrade to 6.7.7.

(April 2005) Himani Apte

Graduate student Himani Apte is a finalist for the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship sponsored by Google. Here is Google's press release. Congratulations!

(March 2005) Condor Week 2005

We recently held our annual Condor Week conference. A survey for attendees, photos, and presentations are now all available for your perusal.

(March 2005) the Render Queue Integration

Read about the Render Queue Integration on Cirque | Digital, LLC's Products web page. From the page "With GDI|Explorer you can submit, manage and prioritize the rendering of your 2D and 3D files directly on an unlimited number of processors using the powerful - yet free - Condor render queue. -- The power of all processors on your network is at your fingertips!"

(March 2005) "UW Condor project is a piece of CERN's massive grid computer"

at the Wisconsin Technology Network. "The University of Wisconsin's Condor software project will provide a component of a cutting-edge grid computing system at European research heavyweight CERN, the IDG news service reports." "After finding no commercial grid applications that satisfied all its needs, CERN took to cobbling together a system from a variety of sources, starting with the Globus Toolkit from the Globus Alliance and using the Condor project's scheduling software."

(March 2005) "CERN readies world's biggest science grid"

in Computerworld. "Instead, CERN based its grid on the Globus Toolkit from the Globus Alliance, adding scheduling software from the University of Wisconsin's Condor project and tools developed in Italy under the European Union's DataGrid project."

(March 2005) Condor 6.7.6 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.6. It includes support for using the "grid" universe with resources managed by the beta releases of the Globus Toolkit 4.0, the Stork data movement server, and a high-availability daemon to provide backup central managers contributed by Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.6 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.6 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases. Users of previous 6.7 versions are urged to upgrade.

(March 2005) Condor 6.6.9 released!

6.6.9 is the latest release of our stable series. 6.6.9 contains several critical bug fixes and all users are encouraged to upgrade immediately. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.6.9 is available from our Downloads page.

(March 2005) Condor 6.7.5 released!

The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release of Condor 6.7.5. 6.7.5 is the fifth release of our development series, and is primarily a new feature release. Condor 6.7.5 includes the SOAP interface to some Condor daemons, a option to DAGman to abort a DAG when a node fails with a specific error code, enhancements to the MPI universe in scheduling and requirements, and speed-ups in claiming large number of machines. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.5 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.5 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases. Users of previous 6.7 versions are urged to upgrade.

(February 2005) Condor 6.6.8 released!

6.6.8 is the latest release of our stable series. 6.6.8 is primarily a bug fix release. 6.6.8, and all future releases will no longer support Redhat Linux on IA64, Digital UNIX 4.0f, and Solaris 7. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.6.8 is available from our Downloads page.

(February 2005) "An eagle-eye view of the Condor project"

This article by Jeff Mausolf is on IBM's developerWorks web site. "Condor addresses both of these problem areas by providing a single tool that can manage a cluster of dedicated compute nodes and effectively harness otherwise wasted cycles from idle desktop workstations."

(February 2005) Hartford Life is in the news

The Hartford Financial Services Group is doing very well with Condor. See "Grid Computing At Hartford Life" by Tammy J. McInturff in the LOMA newsletter." Also, see "Analyze This", by Steve Dwyer, (in Insurance Networking News) mentions the Hartford Financial Services Group's deployment of Condor. "'Prior to the grid initiative, we had hit a ceiling with the level of horsepower we could deploy in running calculations through servers and desktops,' says Severino." And, in December 2004, see "Mother of Invention ", by Anthony O'Donnell, (in Insurance & Technology magazine) describes the Hartford Financial Services Group's deployment and use of Condor. "The [Condor] grid solution 'is actually more robust,' [CIO Vittorio Severino] says. 'The value is, No. 1, it just creates capacity; No. 2, it's a more stable environment; and then, No. 3, we enjoy the obvious cost savings.'"

(January 2005) "Using the GRID to improve the computation speeed of electrical impedance tomography (EIT) reconstruction algorithms" (PDF) in Physiological Measurement

Authors Fritschy, Horesh, Holder, and Bayford presents an improvement to image quality generation (using Condor), that make clinical use of the images more practical. "Using the GRID middleware "Condor" and a cluster of 920 nodes, reconstruction of EIT images of the human head with a non-linear algorithmwas speeded up by 25-40 times compared to serial processing of each image."

(December 2004) Condor 6.7.3 released!

6.7.3 is the fourth release of our development series. 6.7.3 is primarily a new feature release. 6.7.3 is the first release to fully support checkpointing on Linux distributions Fedora Core 1, 2, and 3. 6.7.3 also includes preliminary support for a new remote submission feature that will complement flocking and the grid universe. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.3 is available from our Downloads page. We believe 6.7.3 is fairly stable, but it is not recommended for production systems, unless you require checkpointing support for a Linux distribution not supported by our 6.6 releases. Users of previous 6.7 versions are urged to upgrade.

(November 2004) Condor Week 2005 announced

Condor Week 2005 will be the week of March 14th, 2005. We hope you can join us! More details...

(October 2004) "Solving Optimization Problems with Grid-Enabled Technologies".

Enrique Alba and Antonio J. Nebro discuss research efforts in ECRIM News.

(October 2004) Stork 0.9.1 released.

Support for Redhat 9 and Enterprise Linux 3 has been added to the Stork data placement scheduler. See the Stork home page for release notes and downloads.

(October 2004) Condor 6.6.7 released!

6.6.7 is the latest release of our stable series. 6.6.7 is primarily a bug fix release. New features include support for the Windows Firewall on Windows XP SP2. 6.6.7, and all future releases will no longer support HP-UX 10.20, Digital UNIX 4.0f, and Solaris 7. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.6.7 is available from our Downloads page.

(October 2004) Condor 6.7.2 released!

6.7.2 is the third release of our development series. 6.7.2 is primarily a bug fix release. New features include support for multiple collectors and better support for the Linux 2.6 kernel. 6.7.2, and all future releases (including 6.6 series releases) will no longer support HP-UX 10.20, Digital UNIX 4.0f, and Solaris 7. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.2 is available from our Downloads page. 6.7.2 is not recommended for production systems, but is believed to be relatively stable. Users of 6.7.0 and 6.7.1 should upgrade to 6.7.2.

(September 2004) UK Condor Week will be Oct 11-15th, 2004!

We are pleased to announce the inaugural United Kingdom (UK) Condor Week, a workshop for the Condor community, to be held at NeSC in Edinburgh, Scotland on October 11th to 15th 2004. Anyone who would like to take part should register by Oct 04, 2004. You can learn more on the conference web page.

(August 2004) Condor 6.7.1 released!

6.7.1 is the latest version of our current development release series. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.1 is available from our Downloads page.

(July 2004) Condor 6.6.6 released!

6.6.6 is the latest version of our current stable release series. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.6 is available from our Downloads page.

(May 2004) Condor 6.6.5 released!

6.6.5 is the latest version of our current stable release series. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.6 is available from our Downloads page.

(April 2004) Condor 6.7.0 released!

6.7.0 is the first release of our development series. It includes some exciting new features, including support for jobs to tolerate network failures between the submit and execute sites, job mirroring between multiple submit points, high availability between some daemons, DRMAA support, the ability to submit into grids managed by GT3 web services, NorduGrid, and Oracle jobs, support for MyProxy Online Credential Management, over two gigabyte file transfer support, steaming output from vanilla jobs, and many other features. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.7.0 is available from our Downloads page.

(April 2004) We recently finished Paradyn-Condor Week

Presentations that were given can be found online. There are also a few pictures available.

(April 2004) Condor "Setup Hawkeye" package is available

Version 0.1.0 of the Condor "Setup Hawkeye" package is now available. We've been getting an increasing stream of requests to make it easier to add Hawkeye features to your existing Condor. To solve this problem, we've created the above package which modifies your Condor configuration & installs the same "install module" script as is used in Hawkeye (except that here it's named condor_install_module instead of hawkeye_install_module). You can then download & install the same modules as you can for Hawkeye, and can then use the dynamic attributes in your Machine Ad for match-making purposes. More details are available through the Hawkeye page

(April 2004) Condor 6.6.3 and 6.6.4 released!

6.6.4 and 6.6.3 are the latest version of our current stable release series. 6.6.4 is for MacOS X and Windows only, and is otherwise identical to 6.6.3. 6.6.3 includes support for Globus 3.2, and removes support for Globus releases prior to 2.2. If you are not using the Globus universe, there is very little difference between 6.6.2 and 6.6.3. See the Version History and Release Notes for details. Condor 6.6 is available from our Downloads page.

(Feb 2004) Paradyn-Condor Week will be April 14-16th, 2004!

The annual Condor meeting will take place as part of Paradyn-Condor week at the Fluno Center on University of Wisconsin, Madison campus on April 14th-16th, 2004. You can learn more on the conference web page.

(March 2004) NeST 0.9.6 released

NeST version 0.9.6 has been released and is available for download.

(July 2003) Condor-Users mailing list opened!

A new mailing list for condor users has been added. The Condor Users mailing list is designed to bring the Condor user community together to share ideas, problems, and solutions. It is meant to supplement, but not replace, our existing support channels.

(June 2003) New section on platform-specific information added to the Condor manual.

(April 2003) Version 2.0 of the fault tolerant shell is available.

(April 203) Top Five Myths About Condor posted.

(Feb 2003) Read the article "An Interview with Visionary Miron Livny of University of Wisconsin" in the Feb 10th issue of GRIDtoday.

(Feb 2003) Condor is going open source!

The usage license for Condor has changed to the Condor Public License, a very liberal license that permits installation, use, reproduction, display, modification and redistribution of Condor, with or without modification, in source and binary forms. This license has already been applied to the binary downloads for Condor version 6.4.7 for both UNIX and Windows. The Condor Team is busily preparing the source code for public release under the terms of the Condor Public License as well. Stay tuned!

(January 2003) Condor 6.4.7 for Windows and UNIX released!

Condor 6.4.7 for both UNIX and Windows has been released. 6.4.7 corrects a critical bug with Condor that caused a misreporting of jobs in the pool. It is available from our Downloads page.

(November 2002) Condor-G included in NMI version 2.1

Condor-G is a featured component of the Grids Center Software Suite which is part of the NSF Middleware Initiative.
Here's the associated NSF press release.

(Feb 2002) NeST 0.6 released

NeST 0.9 has been released. It is available under the GPL license.

(Jan 2002) Bypass release 2.4.9

Bypass, a tool for building interposition agents, is released under the GPL and is available from the Bypass page.

(November 2001) ClassAd C++ Library, version 0.9

The C++ standalone ClassAd library has been released. It is available under the LGPL license. It is available from the ClassAds page.

(October 2001) Condor Version 6.3.1 released!

Condor Version 6.3.1 has been released, and is available on the downloads page. 6.3.1 is the second release in the 6.3 development series. The main focus of this release was bug fixes over the 6.3.0 release and support for Redhat 7.1 Linux. The complete list of changes can be found here

(September 2001) NMI is the NSF Middleware Initiative, and Condor is part of it.

() Condor Version 6.2.1 released!

Condor Version 6.2.1 has been released, and is available on the downloads page. 6.2.1 is the second release in the 6.2 stable series. The main focus of this release was bug fixes over the 6.2.0 release, and all 6.2.0 users are urged to upgrade to 6.2.1. The complete list of changes can be found here

() Condor Version 6.3.0 released!

Condor Version 6.3.0 has been released, and is available on the downloads page. 6.3.0 is the first release in the 6.3 development series. Future 6.3 releases will contain many new features, primarily in the areas of MPI support, Globus support, firewall support, an improved DAGMan, improved error handling / propagation, and bandwidth regulation. For more info on our version-number system, please read this.

The UNIX builds are now availble on the website. The primary focus of 6.3.0 has been in preliminary support for MPI jobs on dedicated clusters of machines. 6.3.0 is not as well-tested as 6.2.0, and undoubtedly contains a number of bugs. It should not be used by those requiring a tried and tested system; for that we recommend the 6.2 stable series.

(Feb 2001) Condor Version 6.2.0 released!

Condor Version 6.2.0 has been released, and is available on the downloads page. 6.2.0 is the first release in the 6.2 stable series. Future 6.2.X releases will be mainly bug fixes. For more info on our version-number system, please read this.

The UNIX and NT builds are now availble on the website, and 6.0 and 6.1 releases have been removed. The 6.2.0 manual is also available, and includes a section on how to upgrade your pool from 6.0.3 to 6.2.0. The 6.3 DAGMan will also be released very soon.

(Feb 2001) Condor Version 6.1.17 released!

Condor Version 6.1.17 is now released, and is available on the downloads page.

6.1.17 adds full support for Solaris 8 and some bug fixes.

6.1.17 will likely be the last version of Condor until the 6.2.0 release. New users should choose it over 6.0.3.

(September 2000) Announcing the formation of an Internet2 PKI Lab at UW-Madison!

The press release, the Internet2 PKI Lab home page, and the Internet2 PKI Lab at UW-Madison home page

(September 2000) Condor Version 6.1.16 released!

Condor Version 6.1.16 is now released, and is available on the downloads page.

(September 2000) Condor NT Version 6.1.16_preview released!

Condor NT Version 6.1.16_preview is now released, and is available on the downloads page. It fixes several bugs, including some significant memory leaks, from the previous Condor NT release. There are a signifigant number of changes and issues to know about between Condor NT and Condor for UNIX, so please read Chapter 5, Condor for Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, in the version 6.1 manual which is also downloadable in several formats.

(August 2000) Condor Version 6.1.15 released!

As our 6.1 development series winds down, we have released 6.1.15 which provides several enhancements, as well as numerous bug fixes, including the fix that avoids the 2.2.14 Linux kernel bug.

For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

---

If you install the Unix version of Condor 6.1.15 into a new pool, you will have ADD the following three lines into your condor_config.local file on your central manger:

DAEMON_LIST   = MASTER, COLLECTOR, NEGOTIATOR, STARTD, SCHEDD
COLLECTOR     = $(SBIN)/condor_collector
NEGOTIATOR    = $(SBIN)/condor_negotiator

Naturally, if you run fewer things on your central manager, you should take them out of the DAEMON_LIST.

(August 2000) Linux Kernel Bug Touched By Condor!

The default Linux kernel shipped with Red Hat 6.2 contains a bug which Condor can trigger. This would cause Red Hat 6.2 machines running Condor to hang. All Red Hat 6.2 users should either upgrade their kernel to 2.2.16 or later, or upgrade to Condor Version 6.1.15, which will be out early the week of 8/21/00.

(June 2000) Condor Version 6.1.14 released!

Soon after the 6.1.13 release of Condor we noticed that it had a bug with periodic checkpointing. 6.1.14 fixes this as well adds support for Red Hat 6.2. For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(June 2000) Condor Version 6.1.13 released!

Condor version 6.1.13 contains full support for Solaris 2.7. In addition, it fixes a number of bugs in version 6.1.12. There are a few remaining known bugs, but they are all very minor. These known bugs are listed in the version history (see below) and will be fixed in the next release. There are a number of new features in 6.1.13, as well. For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(Feb 2000) Condor Version 6.1.12 released!

Condor version 6.1.12 contains bug fixes for all the major bugs in 6.1.11. There are a few remaining known bugs, but they are all very minor. These known bugs are listed in the version history (see below) and will be fixed in the next release. Anyone who downloaded 6.1.11 should upgrade to 6.1.12 as soon as possible. For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(Feb 2000) Fortran bugs found in version 6.1.11 for Solaris and IRIX

Condor version 6.1.11 contains bugs in the way we handle certain system calls that are used by Fortan. This is a problem particularly on Solaris and IRIX, though other platforms might have problems as well. We will release a new version shortly that corrects these problems. If you are only using vanilla jobs, this should not effect you. If you do not relink your jobs with condor_compile using the 6.1.11 libraries, you will also not have this problem (though you also won't be able to use many of the new features in 6.1.11).

(Feb 2000) Condor Version 6.1.11 released!

Condor version 6.1.11 contains a large number of bug fixes, and new features. In particular, there is enhanced support for various remote system calls, a much better infrastructure for Condor-level I/O buffering, and better reporting in the notification email. In addition, limited support for network sockets within "standard universe" jobs is now available. This is also the first version with full support for checkpointing and remote system calls under Irix 6.5. For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(January 2000) Condor in the news!

Condor has been mentioned in NCSA Datalink, in the January 2000 edition, as well as NAS News: NAS Condor Population Expands to Hundreds.

(November 1999) condor_status bug in 6.1.10 found

Condor version 6.1.10 contains a minor bug in the condor_status program. For some sites, this causes condor_status to have a segmentation fault, be killed by SIGSEGV, and to drop a core file when trying to display the totals at the end of condor_status. If you are upgrading to 6.1.10 from a previous version, please save your old condor_status binary and install that into your Condor bin directory once you have completed your upgrade. Version 6.1.11 will fix this bug.

(November 1999) Condor Version 6.1.10 released!

Condor version 6.1.10 contains a fix to a bug in the checkpointing code for "standard" jobs introduced in 6.1.9. In addition, "clipped" support for Sparc Solaris 2.7 is available for the first time in 6.1.10. A few other minor features were added as well, including a -format option to condor_q. For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(November 1999) Checkpointing bug in Condor Version 6.1.9

Condor 6.1.9 contains a bug in the checkpointing code for "standard" jobs. Once a job checkpoints for the first time, it will no longer be able to checkpoint again. If you are using the standard universe (relinking your jobs with condor_compile), you are going to have problems with 6.1.9. A new version will be released very soon to fix this bug.

(November 1999) Condor Version 6.1.9 released!

Condor 6.1.9 is now available from the main site (Madison, WI, USA).

Along with a whole series of bug fixes and new features, 6.1.9 is the first version of Condor to fully support all main Intel Linux distributions, including the 2.2.X kernel, and all 3 versions of the C library now in use (libc5, glibc 2.0 and glibc 2.1). For more info on Condor support for Linux, please see The Condor Linux README.

For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(October 1999) A Preview version of Condor for Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 is now available!

The initial version of Condor NT is now available on the downloads page. There are a significant number of changes and issues to know about, so please read Chapter 5, Condor for Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, in the version 6.1 manual which is also downloadable in several formats.

(August 1999) The Condor Manuals are now available from the Mirror Site!

The Condor Version 6.0 and Version 6.1 manuals, in several formats, are available for download from the Madison, WI, USA or Bologna, Italy sites.

(August 1999) Condor Version 6.1.8 released

Condor 6.1.8 is now available from the main site (Madison, WI, USA), or from the mirror site (Bologna, Italy).

Of the major improvements in this release, the condor_schedd has been fixed to handle clusters of hundreds/thousands of jobs more efficiently. For standard jobs you can now also specify file buffering, as well as file remapping.

For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(June 1999) Condor Mirror Site!

Condor Downloads can now be downloaded from Bologna, Italy (courtesy of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare Sezione di Bologna).

(June 1999) Condor Version 6.1.7 Released

Condor 6.1.7 is now available for download for Alpha Linux and Intel Linux with glibc. There are no other new features, and no bug fixes from 6.1.6, so we do not even provide binaries for 6.1.7 on any other platforms. On Alpha Linux, we only support vanilla jobs at this time. There is no support for checkpointing and remote system calls yet (though we'll be working on that and making it available ASAP). For Intel, all of the linking problems with machines using glibc 2.0.X and the various versions of EGCS have been resolved in 6.1.7. Therefore, Red Hat 5.X and Debian 2.0.X should work. Red Hat 6.0 and the latest Debian release are NOT SUPPORTED by Condor yet. They use the new 2.2.X Linux kernel, and glibc version 2.1.X, which are not supported at this time. Sometime soon, we'll support all combinations of kernels, compilers, and versions of libc that are available with Linux. For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(June 1999) Condor Version 6.1.6 Released.

Condor 6.1.6 is now available for download. Version 6.1.6 fixes many serious bugs from 6.1.5. In addition, it provides many new features, including the ability to dynamically reconfigure the number of virtual machines reported by the SMP startd, SMP support for Digital Unix machines and much more. There are still some unresolved problems with Linux running Red Hat 5.2 (LINUX-GLIBC). This platform is not supported in 6.1.6. A 6.1.7 release will follow very soon, which will support Red Hat 5.2. Red Hat 6.0 is NOT SUPPORTED by Condor yet. It uses the new 2.2.X Linux kernel, which is not supported at this time. Like all development releases, this release is INCOMPATIBLE with previous versions of Condor. DO NOT TRY TO USE IT IN A POOL WITH ANY 6.1.5 DAEMONS. For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(April 1999) Condor Version 6.1.5 Released.

Condor 6.1.5 is now available for download. Version 6.1.5 fixes many bugs. Major things that are fixed in this release are: Fortran under Linux, Redhat 5.2 support, condor_preen fixes, and others... NOTE: condor_userprio, condor_stats, the -pool option to many Condor tools, and Condor PVM are all broken by a change introduced in 6.1.5. These will all be fixed in 6.1.6. For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(March 1999) Use of MemoryRequirements in the UW Madison CS Pool

The UW Madison CS Condor pool has been configured to check for a MemoryRequirements parameter in all Condor jobs. This parameter specifies, in megabytes, how much physical memory your job needs to run efficiently. If this parameter is not specified, Condor will assume a default value of 128 MB. Condor will only run jobs on machines with enough available physical memory to satisfy the jobs' memory requirements. To specify this parameter, please add the following to your job description file(s):

  +MemoryRequirements = 90

replacing 90 with the actual memory requirements of your job in megabytes. We encourage you to continue to specify your job's virtual memory requirements with the image_size command in your job description file.

(March 1999) CondorView Client Contrib Module now available

The CondorView Client contrib module automatically generates HTML pages that publish usage statistics about your pool to the World Wide Web. Quickly and easily view how much Condor is being used, how many cycles are being delivered, and who is using them. View utilization by machine platform or by user. Interact with a Java applet to customize the visualization, or to zoom-in to a specific time frame. Click here to see what the pages generated by this module look like. Complete installation directions are available in the Condor v6.1 Manual.

(March 1999) Condor Version 6.1.4 Released - Version 6.1.3 removed!

A fatal bug was found in Version 6.1.3 that would cause daemons to die on signal 8 (SIGFPE). Version 6.1.4 has been released to fix that (and a couple other minor things). For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(March 1999) Process Hijacking paper

A new paper discussing taking currently running processes and submitting them into Condor.

(Feb 1999) Condor Version 6.1.3 (development series) Released

The latest version of the development series is now available for download. NOTE: There are a lot of new, unstable features in 6.1.3. PLEASE do not install all of 6.1.3 on a production pool. Almost all of the bug fixes in 6.1.3 are in the condor_startd or condor_starter, so, unless you really know what you're doing, we recommend you just upgrade SMP-Startd contrib module, not the entire 6.1.3 release. In addition, many things dealing with queue management have been overhauled, so tools such as condor_q, condor_rm, and others, are incompatible with older versions. For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(January 1999) Condor Version 6.1.2 (development series) Released

The latest version of the development series is now available for download. It includes DAGMan, the DAG-Manager (see the DAGMan section of the 6.1 manual for details). In addition, it fixes some problems with the 6.1.1 release (missing files, a bug in condor_install, etc). For complete details, you can read about what's new in this version.

(December 1998) More Condor Contrib Modules Released and Condor Version 6.1.1

The Condor Checkpoint server, PVM support, and CondorView server contrib modules are now online! Condor Version 6.1.1 is also available, again, for use if you know what your doing only!

(December 1998) Condor Contrib Modules Released

These optional modules enable you to install new parts of Condor without switching your entire pool to the development series. If you want a certain new feature (like support for SMP machines), we highly recommend you just install the contrib module for that feature, instead of upgrading your whole pool to the development series.

(December 1998) Condor Version 6.1.0 (development series) Released

At long last, the development series of Condor has been released. It supports Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 on Intel and Sparc platforms, Linux for Intel (libc5 and glibc), SGI IRIX 6.2 through 6.4, Digital Unix 4.0, and HPUX 10.20. You can read about what's new in this version. It contains various new features, including support for SMP machines, "flocking", the new CondorView server, and other things. Most of these features can also be installed in your stable pool by using the "contrib" modules that are also released (see above).

(November 1998) Condor Version 6.0.3 Released

This is the new, stable version of Condor. It fully supports Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 on Intel and Sparc platforms, Linux for Intel (libc5 and glibc), SGI IRIX 6.2 through 6.4, Digital Unix 4.0, and HPUX 10.20. You can read about what's new in this version. This version only fixes bugs in Condor's interaction with NIS, and with the benchmarking code that was causing a floating point exception (SIGFPE) on extremely fast machines (like the fastest Alphas). If you don't use NIS, or you weren't having problems with the condor_startd exiting with signal 8, there's no need to upgrade.

(October 1998) Condor Version 6.0.2 Released

This is the new, stable version of Condor. It fully supports Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 on Intel and Sparc platforms, Linux for Intel (libc5 and glibc), SGI IRIX 6.2 through 6.4, Digital Unix 4.0, and HPUX 10.20. You can read about what's new in this version. It contains only bug fixes to Condor Version 6.0.1. A new development release of Condor (version 6.1.0) will be released soon with new features, such as support for running multiple jobs on SMP machines.

(September 1998) Condor Version 6.0.1 Released

This is the new, stable version of Condor. It fully supports Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 on Intel and Sparc platforms, Linux for Intel (libc5 and glibc), SGI IRIX 6.2 through 6.4, Digital Unix 4.0, and HPUX 10.20. You can read about what's new in this version.

(September 1998) New Condor version number scheme.

With the release of Condor Version 6.0.1, we have also introduced a new, hopefully easy to follow version numbering scheme for future versions of Condor. There will now be both a stable release series and a development release series available at any given time (much like the Linux kernel).

(June 1998) Condor Version 6.0.1 beta Released

You can read about what's new in this version.

(May 1998) Condor Version 6.0 Patch Level 4 Released

You can read about what's new in this patch level.

(April 1998) Condor Version 6.0 Manual Released

(April 1998) Condor Version 6.0 Released for SGI, Solaris, LINUX, Alpha

(January 1998) Condor Version 6.0 Beta installed at UW-Madison CS Department Notice

(November 1997) Condor contributes cycles to the largest ever Metacomputing testbed at SC97

(August 1997) Wisconsin Condor Assists Illinois Mathematician .

(August 1997) UW Computing Network Takes Flight With Intel Grant

(July 1997) Condor was used at UW-Madison to attack RC5.

(June 1997) HPCwire interview on HTC .

(June 1997) Condor v5.62 was available for public download.

It contains many bug patches, ports to new platforms including IRIX 6.2 and HPUX 10.20, updated man pages and installation docs, and handy extras (such as the condor_compile command).

(June 1997) HPCU news article

(April 1997) Slides from the Condor presentation at the Ninth Annual NCSA Industrial Partner Executive Meeting.

(March 1997) Condor Takes Flight at NCSA!