The University of Wisconsin in the US first came up with the concept of Condor a couple of years back. This was when Cluster Computing was being talked about. Some years later, Cluster technology is proving to be useful for companies who want some help in saving energy. Condor is an open source tool which allows for efficient use of electric power by personal computers by allocating work to any computer which lies idle in the network. When a user initiates a job on a particular computer, Condor identifies the system which is idle at that point of time, and transfers the job to that idle machine. In addition, it executes the job and retrieves the results too. Imagine a computing set up having to the tune of over 20,000 computers. “Condor can prove to be a cost effective and open source option for increasing the overall computing throughput”, says Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing, a company which offers technical and management support tools for Condor.

However there is still a small irregularity in the system which engineers are working upon. An independent study by Cardiff University has revealed that if a job is allocated to a machine which is idle and if somebody starts using that machine for his own work, the system aborts the job which it was originally assigned. However CheckPointing can help to overcome this problem by providing a workaround which will allow the system to resume the job again.

The USP of Candor is that it brings in huge energy savings and it is an Open Source based initiative. These are incentives enough to encourage large corporate houses to give this technology an honest chance to prove itself