Center for High Throughput Computing
 
The CHTC is now hiring for the following positions: Infrastructure Team Lead, System Administrator, Jr. and Sr. Software Engineers. If you are a curious, talented system admin or developer and want to join one of the world's leading distributed computing research teams, please send a resume to htcondor-jobs@cs.wisc.edu.

The Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) offers computing resources for use by researchers. Approved in August 2006, the CHTC provides the numerous resources at its disposal to keep up with the computational needs of UW-Madison. These resources are funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and various grants from the University itself.

These resources are provided to all UW-Madison researchers, free of charge. Even external collaborators with an on-campus sponsor may be given access to resources.

High throughput computing (HTC) is the shared utilization of autonomous resources toward a common goal, where all the elements are optimized for maximizing computational throughput (Wikipedia entry). View a Windows Media movie interview with Miron Livny and other collaborators on the benefits of high throughput computing, or a Quicktime movie that highlights several applications of HTC on the UW-Madison campus. You can also listen to an interview with Miron Livny and Brooklin Gore on the impact of High Throughput Computing to campus researchers, an excerpt from the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery: Challenge of Transdisciplinary Science pod cast series.

The CHTC facilitates access to an ever-growing set of resources. The UW campus computing grid is comprised of pools of machines approaching a total of 10,000 cores. From July 2011 to June 2012, the CHTC provided 70 Million CPU hours to campus researchers and off-campus collaborators. Learn more in our 2011-2012 Engagement Report (2010-2011 Report).

The CHTC is home to or supports the following projects:

  • The HTCondor project provides the globally-used HTCondor software that powers the CHTC. HTCondor enables the CHTC to maximize job throughput for many simultaneous users, each with different needs. It supports complex workflows, the ability to take checkpoints and then resume jobs, and it enables access to additional computing resources across the globe.
  • The UW Build and Test Lab (BaTLab) is a multi-platform facility that promotes continuous building and testing of software. HTCondor is built in the BaTLab, and the BaTLab helps us work toward our goal of deploying error-free, high quality software for the CHTC. The BaTLab is available to the general public.
  • The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a high-throughput computing infrastructure that supports science. It is an expanding alliance of more than 80 universities, national laboratories, scientific collaborations, and software developers. CHTC users can access OSG's considerable computing and storage resources.
  • The NEOS Online Optimization Service is a high-throughput computing infrastructure that provides solvers for a variety of optimization problems. It also provides a background on the field of optimization in general and includes several case studies that provide beginners with an understanding of optimization problems and approaches to solving them. NEOS is available to the general public.

Learn more about how the CHTC has helped advance a diverse body of research on campus.