Condor program turns idle Clemson desktops into supercomputers
Computations that would take days can be done in hours

Published: Monday, October 22, 2007 - 2:00 am

By Anna Simon
CLEMSON BUREAU
asimon@greenvillenews.com

CLEMSON -- In the wee hours of the morning while Clemson University students are asleep, hundreds of unmanned desktop computers are at work in various labs and offices across the campus.

Clemson's new Condor computing program harnesses the power of idle desktop machines from a pool of about 1,700 on the campus, and turns them into a supercomputing grid that can rapidly process high volumes of data.

Named for a scavenging bird, Clemson University's new Condor computing program searches for computer resources, said Jim Bottum, Clemson's chief information officer.

It's a matchmaker, "exactly like eHarmony.com," Sebastien Goasguen, an assistant professor in Clemson's School of Computing, tells his students.

Researchers tell it what they want to do and Condor finds the computer resources for the job, said Goasguen, who is also a cyber infrastructure adviser to Clemson Computing and Information Technology.

With minimal investment beyond existing resources, the technology puts faculty researchers in the running for more grants and boosts students above the competition in the job market, Bottum said.

In an environment where return on investment is a benchmark for success, the idea is beginning to spread and Clemson is among the schools on the front end.

"While we have Condor running on many campuses, very few of them, not more than handful, are campus grids," said Miron Livny, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and principal investigator of the Condor Project.

Clemson freshman Kemper Talley, of Easley, recently fed thousands of computations for a biophysics project into Condor. Computations that would have taken weeks with one computer were completed in about four days, he said.

"You just submitted a command and it would throw it into a grid," Talley said. "It is very useful because very few people will be using their computer 24 hours a day. I see it definitely being utilized quite a bit, especially on campuses."

Last weekend, Mary Beth Kurz, an assistant professor of industrial engineering at Clemson, who is collaborating with faculty at the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University to design solutions for industrial scheduling problems, requested a series of computations that would have taken 10 years for one regular desktop computer to calculate.

The job was complete by the end of the day Tuesday.

"There was no way I could evaluate this many different settings and options and be able to make a confident statement about the methods performance," said Kurz, who recently applied for a National Science Foundation grant that she wouldn't have tackled without Condor.

Her project addresses computer wafers manufacturing and could help companies schedule jobs through their manufacturing lines faster, in order to make money faster and reduce job-in-progress inventory.

Kurz leads a group of undergraduate students in a creative inquiry research project who are learning about the process and will be able to replicate it for employers or their own businesses when they enter the work force.

Condor will help faculty like Kurz meet Clemson's goal of securing $150 million in externally funded research, Bottum said.

Earlier this month, Chris Przirembel, vice president for research and economic development, announced Clemson's record award of $141.4 million for the 2006-07 academic year and told trustees he believes the $150 million goal can be reached this year.