[Condor-users] Announcing Condor Version 6.8.0!

[Todd Tannenbaum <tannenba@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 14:07:48 -0500
From: Peter Keller <psilord@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Todd Tannenbaum <tannenba@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: world v2
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The Condor Team is pleased to announce the release and immediate availability
of Condor 6.8.0 for download from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor.  Please
note that the Condor Manual is still being updated; these documentation updates
will be complete in mid-August.

Condor 6.8.0 begins a new stable series of Condor and contains the new
features and bug fixes from the Condor 6.7 development series. Some
highlights of this new stable series include:

Connectivity Improvements
	* Ver 6.8.0 supports Generic Connection Brokering (GCB), a technology
	on Linux that enables Condor installations to span across firewalls,
	private networks, and NAT networks.

Availability Improvements
	* If your submit node goes down (e.g. due to machine failure),
	your already running jobs will continue to run until the submit
	node reappears and reconnects to the running jobs. This prevents
	a costly teardown of many, possibly noncheckpointing, jobs.

	* "Hot Failover" - A Condor pool can failover the submission service
	or the central manager service to another machine.

RDBMS Support
	* Condor's new Quill service can mirror job queue and history
	information into a PostgreSQL relational database.

General Performance and Scalability Enhancements
	* The time required to create matches between jobs and machine
	(the "Negotiation Cycle") has been reduced.

	* Condor DAGMan's DAG processing speed has been greatly improved.

	* The submit node now uses a nonblocking protocol when claiming
	execute nodes. This results in faster realization of available
	throughput.

Programmer APIs to Condor
	* SOAP
		Condor now supports a web service interface via SOAP
		over HTTP or HTTPS.
	* DRMAA
		A C binding for job submission and management conforming
		to the DRMAA Specification 1.0 standard.
	* SQL interface to a copy of the job queue via Quill.

Improvements to Condor on Windows
	* Jobs submitted to Condor can run as either a dynamically created user,
	or as the user who submitted the job.  The user's credentials are securely
	stored and transferred.

	* Personal Condor is now available for Windows.

	* A new MSI-based installer.

Backfill job support
	* Machine owners can specify a "background task" to run when otherwise
	idle, with seamless integration with the Berkeley Open Infrastructure
	for Network Computing (BOINC) system.

ClassAd Language Improvements
	* The ClassAd matchmaking language now includes many useful functions,
	such as support for regular expressions, lists, conditionals, and
	string manipulations.  Whoot!

Parallel Computing Improvements
	* New generic parallel job type enables Condor to schedule and manage
	MPI, LAM, MPICH, SCore, and other systems that require one job to
	utilize multiple execution hosts.

Grid Computing Improvements
	* Condor supports building cross-domain compute grids with its
	own "flocking" technology, but can also delegate jobs to
	remote job management services including Globus Toolkit 2,
	Globus Toolkit 4 (incl both pre and post web services),
	Unicore, NorduGrid, Condor, PBS, and LSF.

	* Support for credential refresh and the MyProxy credential wallet service.

	* Inclusion of the Stork data placement service for moving data on a grid.

And many more.

See the version history for further details:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/manual/v6.8.0/8_3Stable_Release.html

Condor 6.8.0 is available from our downloads page:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/downloads/

The Condor Team

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Todd Tannenbaum                       University of Wisconsin-Madison
Condor Project Research               Department of Computer Sciences
tannenba@xxxxxxxxxxx                  1210 W. Dayton St. Rm #4257
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~tannenba      Madison, WI 53706-1685
Phone: (608) 263-7132  FAX: (608) 262-9777