For many years our Condor Pool has been running researchers' computational jobs on a local backbone of always-on servers and by opportunistic use of PCs in teaching clusters (at night and at weekends). We have now configured the Condor Pool to "burst" into the Cloud, specifically Amazon Web Services (AWS), if the queues for the Condor Pool are full. This means that your jobs will run on the Cloud rather than on the Condor Pool.

We are using AWS Spot Instances which, in simple terms, are the spare capacity in AWS at any given time. This is a very cost-effective way of using public Cloud platforms although there is a very small chance the resources are reclaimed by AWS if they are no longer spare.

The Condor Pool is particularly well-suited to large numbers of relatively small and short jobs and help is available to get you started. There are also some initial free resources for early adopters which are funded by The Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP). Longer term usage over a certain limit will be charged for.

If you would like to take advantage of this new service, to discuss if your jobs are suitable or if you just want more information, then please get in touch.