CamGrid is a distributed computing resource based on the Condor middleware, and provides a powerful computational tool for participating university members. These pages describe the facilities available and how Cantabrigians can gain access to them.
CamGrid was conceived by a number of departments and groups within the university who federated their computational facilities. These could be desktops or dedicated machines, possibly behind different firewalls, and using public or private IP addresses. CamGrid mainly caters for serial (single-threaded) applications, but can also handle "small" parallel/MPI jobs. This model has been running since January 2005, with each institution maintaining its own Condor pool, so the grid consists of flocked pools. CamGrid is coordinated by Mark Calleja.
Documentation and Tools
- Technical details of CamGrid can be found here. These include an architectural overview, examples of machine configuration, monitoring tools, usage figures, information on how to join and various tutorials for using different aspects of the grid.
- Early experiences of setting up CamGrid using a VPN are described in this paper. Note that CamGrid no longer uses a VPN, but RFC 1918 (known locally as CUDN-only routeable) addresses as described in the technical details section.
- Manual for Condor v7.4. This is a great place to start learning about Condor. A local copy of the manual (with an added search facility), accessible only from within Cambridge University, can be found here.
Publications
CamGrid is a powerful research tool and has helped its users produce a number of publications, listed here. If your use of CamGrid results in published work then please acknowledge it in the publication and notify me of the details using the email at the foot of this page.
Past CamGrid Events
We have held a number of CamGrid related events in the past, from introductory workshops to scientific showcases. Details of these events, together with the relevant presentations, can be found here.
Demographics
In a survey held in October 2009, CamGrid was shown to have the following user cross-section (information from 130 users):
| Undergraduate | 5.04% |
| Postgraduate | 40.34% |
| Postdoctoral researcher | 38.66% |
| Staff | 14.29% |
| Other | 1.68% |
Contacts
If you would like to use CamGrid, then members of participating departments should contact their relevant sysadmin listed here (Raven protected, with a signed certificate by the UK eScience CA). If your department is not listed then consider asking your relevant representative to join the initiative. We are always happy to welcome new groups from within the University, irrespective of academic discipline.
- Quick links
- Why should you join CamGrid?
- Documentation and technical details
- Monitoring tools and usage figures
- Participating departments and groups
- Publications of work using CamGrid
- What do our users say about CamGrid?
News
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CamGrid's currently in the process of upgrading its Condor middleware to the latest stable release, namely version 7.4.3. Apologies to users for any service disruptions, and your local sysadmin should be able to tell you how long these will last. Upgrade notes for sysadmins can be found here, whereas the current pool versions can be found here.
Example of work carried out on CamGrid
Electronic structure calculations, carried out on CamGrid and involving sweeps of several MPI calculations, have helped explain why the framework material Ag3[Co(CN)6], shown below, exhibits colossal positive and negative thermal expansion. The low temperature structure is on the left, with the high temperature structure on the right.
These findings have been published in Science, 319, p794-797, 8 February (2008).