The Center for High Throughput Computing
Research is a computationally expensive endeavor, demanding on any computing resources available. Quite often, a researcher will require resources for computations for short bursts of time, frequently leaving the computer idle. This often results in wasted potential computation time. This issue can be addressed by means of high-throughput computing.
High-throughput computing allows for many computational tasks to be done over a long period of time. It is concerned largely with the number of compute resources that are available to people who wish to use the system. It is a very useful system for researchers, who are more concerned with the number of computations they can do over long spans of time than they are with short-burst computations. Because of its value to research computations, the Univeristy of Wisconsin set up the Center for High-Throughput Computing to bring researchers and compute resources together.
The Center for High-Throughput Computing (CHTC), approved in August 2006, has numerous resources at its disposal to keep up with the computational needs of UW Madison. These resources are being 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. It aims to pull four different resources together into one operation:
HTC Technologies: The CHTC leans heavily on the Condor project to provide a framework where high-throughput computing can take place. The Condor project aims to make grid and high-throughput computing a reality in any number of environments.
Middleware: The GRIDS branch at UW Madison will be an essential part towards keeping the CHTC running efficiently. GRIDS is funded by the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI). At the University of Wisconsin, the Condor project makes heavy use of this system with their NMI Build & Test facility. The NMI Build & Test facility provides a framework to build and test software on a wide variety of platform and hardware combinations.
Computing Laboratory: The University of Wisconsin has many compute clusters at its disposal. In 2004 the university won an award to build the Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW). GLOW is an interdepartmental pool of Condor nodes, containing more than 1200 CPUs and 100 TB of storage.
Applications: Finally, the CHTC needs researchers to use the resources it has available. Many researchers are already using these facilities. More information about those using the CHTC can be found here.
