An Analysis of Availability Distributions in Condor

In this article, we investigate the dynamics exhibited by the production Condor pool at the University of Wisconsin with the goal of understanding its distributional properties. Condor is a cycle-harvesting service originally designed to launch and control "guest" user jobs (in batch mode) on idle workstations. Since its inception in 1985, however, it has expanded to include the ability to run in dedicated mode on clusters, to "glide in" to systems that are not strictly dedicated to Condor, and to "flock" jobs from one site to another based on pre-determined service level agreements (SLAs). Thus it has developed from an enterprise-wide desktop system into a full-fledged global computing infrastructure over its lifetime.