High Throughput Computing: Stealing Unused Cycles

High Throughput Computing systems (HTC) enable otherwise idles cycles to be available to computations that involve many independent tasks. In a Distributed Computing environment, distributed ownership of computing resources is the major obstacle HTC has to overcome to take advantage of under-utilized systems in the network. This paper addresses HTC and how it fits in current parallel and distributed computing architectures such as Cluster Computing, Internet Computing and Metacomputing. Some of the available HTC packages are presented with a focus on the Condor system. It concludes on the importance of HTC to decrease the gap from personal computing to true parallel departmental computing on existing companies. Finally it addresses the importance of this technology to the future of global computing across multiple organizations (GRID environments).