Miron Livny

"Imprecise language and buzzwords govern the computing ecosystem. I coined the term HTC in the mid-nineties in order to differentiate it from traditional High Performance Computing, known to many as supercomputers."

"What I’m doing today is anchored in my PhD work in the late 1970s. I always joke that I’ve been working on the same problem for over 40 years and it’s still not done! My thesis was on load balancing and distributed systems."

"I was always fascinated by the simple problem that you have a quest for work sitting and waiting in one place and a resource capable and willing to serve it is idling in another place. How do you bring them together? It turns out it’s an unsolvable problem so I can work for 40 more years."

"There are two Nobel Prize discoveries whose computation system was powered by HTCondor––the Higgs Boson in 2012 and then recently detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO collaboration. So I am always joking, I’m looking for the triple crown. But I can’t say that they’re more important or challenging than other works of science powered by HTCondor."

"But the personal angle is that we always saw what we are doing as expanding from the desktop to the world. And that’s how we went from the campus to nation-wide and beyond."

"We now share HTC capabilities across more than 125 institutions. And that brought with it many complications, not only in terms of volume of users, but also in diversity of science domains, types of institutions and politics. I always listed sociology as the top obstacle to high throughput computing and we have our fair share in the Open Science Grid."