Experiences in processing MPI application in Condor environments

Abstract

Condor is a middleware specially design to manage job queues in dedicated and non-dedicated infrastructure. Condor seems to be a suitable tool to be used when the lack of available dedicated resources represent an impediment to run large application problems. This paper discusses the use of Condor in processing MPI applications problems in homogeneous and heterogeneous pools of nodes. In particular several experiments with different computing and network usage have been performed. From these tests it is concluded that Condor introduces a negligible overhead and also allows to conform scalable pools of nodes with a good cost-benefit ratio.