[Condor-users] unsure about potential application

[andrew.downs@xxxxxxxx]

Greetings, I'm trying to find out if Condor is the right software for what I'm doing.  My application (q3map2.exe) is a type of compiler that assembles map data for Quake 3 Arena.  The kinds of things I've designed for it have become so complex that I think a small cluster might be in order.  While reading through Condor documentation, I saw this:

"Multi-process jobs are not allowed. This includes system calls such as fork(), exec(), and system()."

q3map2 can be multi-threaded for either SMP or multi-core configurations.  Is that the same as being multi-process?

My long term plan was to have 4 systems, each with a 6-core AMD chip all chewing through the same data set (but different parts) at the same time, in other words, my aim is to have q3map2 utilize the computational resources of each machine as if all of the cores in the separate systems were all in one system.

My vague understanding of Condor is that if you submit a job (presumably q3map2.exe) Condor would find all of the available machines and split up the work between them in some fashion.

What leads me to believe this is:

Myth: Condor requires users to recompile their applications.
Reality: Condor runs ordinary, unmodified applications.

I'm not even sure how that's possible, but if it is, it's incredible and perfect for what i'd like to do.

Is condor too much for what I'm trying to do?  Should I be looking somewhere else?  Reading something else?

Thanks for your time.