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What does this map show?
This map displays all of the Condor pools worldwide that are
willing to make their presence known to us
at the University of Wisconsin.
Within the United States, each pool is plotted to the nearest city.
Outside the United States, each pool is plotted at the capital of
the host country. A grid structure is used to visually distinguish
multiple pools that would otherwise fall in the same spot.
What is a Condor pool?
A Condor pool is a collection of computers that pool their resources
in order to make all of their combined power available to any of the
participants. A Condor pool can range from just one machine to
many thousands of machines.
What is the Condor Project?
The Condor Project
is a research program
led by Miron Livny
at the University of Wisconsin.
Since 1985, the Condor Project has researched and developed new ways
for ordinary people to discover, share, and exploit large amounts
of computing power.
How is this data collected?
Many Condor pools in the world send periodic messages to
to a server at the University of Wisconsin,
giving a short summary of the pool name, internet address,
number of hosts, and a few other details.
Some of these messages are delivered every two weeks by email,
while others are delivered every five minutes by UDP.
Some pools report in both manners, some by one only, and some not at all.
We periodically collect these messages and transform the
internet addresses into geographic coordinates to produce this map.
Does this map show all Condor pools in the world?
No, it certainly does not.
This is primarily because we do not receive periodic messages
from all installed Condor pools. The most common reason for this is that
Condor pool managers can freely choose not to send us messages, perhaps
due to concerns of security and privacy. Another reason might
be that they are behind a firewall or private network, so the
address that we see cannot be resolved to a physical location.
Other reasons include incorrect or incomplete WHOIS entries,
and so on...
We don't know exactly how many operating Condor pools
there are in the world. We do know of the ones on this map,
and we also know that the Condor software is downloaded from our
web site about a thousand times a month.
How do you map internet addresses to geographic coordinates?
There are a variety of techniques to map IP addresses, none
of them completely reliable. If you need to do this in a high
volume way for an important task, there are many commercial services
that can do it with varying levels of accuracy.
Here's how we do it on the cheap:
Is the plotting accurate? Why do some points fall in the ocean?
Condor pools tend to clump together. It we plotted them
accurately, you wouldn't be able to see much. So, we line up
the squares in a grid so that they can be seen and counted.
Due to the grid structure, some squares are significantly out
of position, and some, such as Miami, fall in the ocean.
Our map data has several significant omissions. For example,
Ireland appears to be missing.
Why do the Condor pools clump together?
There are several possible reasons for a clump.
One is that pools really are physically clumped together.
This is the result of social effects. If one person or project
establishes a Condor pool, there is encouragement and help
for others nearby to set up Condor pools. Of course, we offer
lots of encouragement to do this in Madison, Wisconsin, so there
is a clump there. Similar things happen at other institutions.
Another reason is that many addresses in the WHOIS system give the
location of the
administrator of a large organization, or perhaps that organization's
internet service provider, not the physical location of the machine
itself. Thus, we see a big clump in the San Francisco bay area,
where the network operations of many California organizations are centered.
Outside of the United States, we are only able to resolve location
to the correct country, and then simply plot the squares around the
capital.
I want my Condor pool to be on this map!
Great, thanks for helping out. First, make sure that your central manager has a complete and valid domain name. Then, set the following configuration variables:
CONDOR_DEVELOPERS = condor-admin@cs.wisc.edu CONDOR_DEVELOPERS_COLLECTOR = condor.cs.wisc.edu
I DO NOT want my Condor pool to be on this map!
That's fine, too. Set the following configuration variables:
CONDOR_DEVELOPERS = NONE CONDOR_DEVELOPERS_COLLECTOR = NONE