This Morgridge Institute news article explains the rich back-story of HTCondor's role behind the recent announcement that scientists from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) unlocked the final door to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. More than 700 LIGO scientists have used HTCondor to run complex data analysis workflows, accumulating 50 million core-hours in the past six months alone.

This Open Science Grid news article discusses how a pilot project at the RHIC/ATLAS Computing Facility (RACF) at Brookhaven National Laboratory has used HTCondor-G to incorporate virtual machines from Amazon's Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) spot market into a scientific computation platform. The ATLAS experiment is moving towards using commercial clouds for computation as budget constraints make maintaining dedicated data centers more difficult.

This Open Science Grid news article discusses how the Baker Lab at the University of Washington has used HTCondor and the OSG to successfully simulate the cylindrical TIM-barrel (triosephosphate isomerase-barrel) protein fold, which has been a challenge for nearly 30 years. TIM-barrel protein folds occur widely in enzymes, meaning that understanding them is important for applications such as the development of new vaccines. The Baker Lab performed about 2.4 million core hours of computation on the OSG in 2015.

This Open Science Grid news article discusses the role of HTCondor, Pegasus and the Open Science Grid in the recently-announced discovery of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). LIGO used a single HTCondor-based system to run computations across LIGO Data Grid, OSG and Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE)-based resources, and consumed 3,956,910 compute hours on OSG.

The HTCondor team is pleased to announce the release of HTCondor 8.5.2. This development series release contains new features that are under development. This release contains all of the bug fixes from the 8.4.4 stable release. Enhancements in the release include: condor_q now defaults to showing only the current user's jobs; condor_q -batch produces a single line report for a batch of jobs; Docker Universe jobs now report and update memory and network usage; immutable and protected job attributes; improved performance when querying a HTCondor daemon's location; Added the ability to set ClassAd attributes within the DAG file; DAGMan now provides event timestamps in dagman.out. Further details can be found in the Version History. HTCondor 8.5.2 binaries and source code are available from our Downloads page.

The HTCondor team is pleased to announce the release of HTCondor 8.4.4. A stable series release contains significant bug fixes. Highlights of this release are: fixed a bug that could cause the collector to crash when DNS lookup fails; fixed a bug that caused Condor-C jobs with short lease durations to fail; fixed bugs that affected EC2 grid universe jobs; fixed a bug that prevented startup if a prior version shared port file exists; fixed a bug that could cause the condor_shadow to hang on Windows; a few other bug fixes, consult the version history. Further details can be found in the Version History. HTCondor 8.4.4 binaries and source code are available from our Downloads page.

*REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN* (until 22nd Feb.)!! The workshop fee is 80 EUROS (VAT included), which covers the lunches and all coffee breaks along the event. The list of recommended hotels, instructions for fee payment, and how to get to the venue is available in the workshop homepage.

• Where: Barcelona, Spain, at the ALBA Synchrotron Facility
• When: Monday February 29 2016 through Friday March 4 2016.
• Workshop homepage: https://indico.cern.ch/e/Spring2016HTCondorWorkshop

The HTCondor team is re-releasing the RPMs for 8.4.3 and 8.5.1. A recent change to correct problems with Standard Universe in the RPM packaging resulted in unoptimized binaries to be packaged. The new RPMs have optimized binaries.