Mechanisms for High Throughput Computing

For many experimental scientists, scienti c progress and quality of research are strongly linked to computing throughput. In other words, most scientists are concerned with how many oating point operations per week or per month they can extract from their computing environment rather than the number of such operations the environment can provide them per second or minute. Floating point operations per second (FLOPS) has been the yardstick used by most High Performance Computing (HPC) e orts to rank their systems. Little attention has been devoted by the computing community to environments that can deliver large amounts of processing capacity over very long periods of time. We refer to such environments as High Throughput Computing (HTC) environments.