Exceptional Features

Reliability

An HTCondor job “is like money in the bank”. After successful submission, HTCondor owns the job, and will run it to completion, even if the submit machine or execute machine crash, and require HTCondor to restart the job elsewhere.

Scalability

An HTCondor pool is horizontally scalable to hundreds of thousands of execute cores running a similar number of running jobs, and an even larger number of idle jobs. HTCondor is also scalable down to run an entire pool on a single machine, and many scales between these two extremes.

Security

HTCondor, by default, uses strong authentication and encryption on the wire. The HTCondor worker node scratch directories can be encrypted, so that if a node is stolen or broken into, scratch files are unreadable.

Parallelization without Reimplementation or Redesign

HTCondor is able to run most programs which researchers can run on their laptop or their desktop, in any programming language, such as C, Fortran, Python, Julia, Matlab, R or others, without changing the code. HTCondor will do the work of running your code as parallel jobs, so it is not necessary to implement parallelism in your code.

Portability and Heterogeneity

HTCondor runs on most Linux distributions and on Windows. A single HTCondor pool can support machines of different OSes. Worker nodes need not be identically provisioned – HTCondor detects the memory, CPU cores, GPUs and other machine resources available on a machine, and only runs jobs that match their needs to the machine’s capabilities.

Pools of Machines can be Joined Together

Flocking allows jobs submitted from one pool of HTCondor machines to execute on another authorized pool.

Jobs Can Be Ordered

A set of jobs where the output of one or more jobs becomes the input of one or more other jobs, can be defined, such that HTCondor will run the jobs in the proper order, and organize the inputs and outputs properly. This is accomplished with a directed acyclic graph, where each job is a node in the graph.

HTCondor Can Use Remote Resources, from a Cloud, a Supercomputer Allocation, or a Grid

Glidein allows jobs submitted to HTCondor to be executed on machines in remote pools in various locations worldwide. These remote pools can be in one or more clouds, in an allocation on a HPC site, in a different HTCondor pool or on a compute grid.

Sensitive to the Desires of Machine Owners

The owner of a machine has complete priority over the use of the machine. HTCondor lets the machine’s owner decide if and how HTCondor uses the machine. When HTCondor relinquishes the machine, it cleans up any files created by the jobs that ran on the system.

Flexible Policy Mechanisms

HTCondor allows users to specify very flexible policies for how they want jobs to be run. Conversely, it independently allows the owners of machines to specify very flexible policies about what jobs (if any) should be run on their machines. Together, HTCondor merges and adjudicates these policy requests into one coherent system.

The ClassAd mechanism in HTCondor provides an expressive framework for matchmaking resource requests with resource offers. Users can easily request both job requirements and job desires. For example, a user can require that their job must be started on a machine with a certain amount of memory, but should there be multiple available machines that meet that criteria, to select the one with the most memory.