Software Development

The Software Development Team supports, sustains, and enhances the HTCondor Software Suite (HTCSS) to enable the potential of distributed High Throughput Computing. This suite of software tools includes HTCondor, components to build both on-premise HTCondor compute clusters for use by independent academic, commercial, and government campuses, and components to support the federation of processing and data resources across the OSG.

Software Development Team activities balance the inherent tension between the desire for innovation, the expectation of stability and dependability for widely adopted production software, and the immediate demands from our stakeholders.

Innovation Activity

A mix of non-stop evolving changes in technologies, user and application requirements, and business models will provide a continuous stream of new challenges and opportunities to the effectiveness of the HTCSS. To continue providing a high level of value to the scientific community, HTCSS must evolve through continuous enhancement and innovation. Our innovation activity works to gather and define requirements from domain researchers and subsequently apply or invent distributed processing patterns and mechanisms to tackle the challenges of dHTC, while staying abreast of relevant industry and technology developments to be leveraged.

Implementation, Quality Assurance, and Packaging Activities

These activities are responsible for translating innovations into production-quality, well-maintained, and documented open source software trusted by organizations for wide-scale production deployment.

Support and Use Activities

Our support activities include issue-tracked support from the developers, management of open-source contributions, regular collaboration with large facilities, and active participation by developers in community email lists and workshops. We recognize a key part of our translational research is to observe the end-user and administrator user experience. As such, our use activities will directly involve developers in the operation of a large, production dHTC infrastructure at CHTC to function as a living lab for the team to understand first-hand the strengths and weaknesses of their work, as well as obtain feedback on the user experience.