During the week of May 1-4, I attended CondorWeek 2012 in Madison, WI. The event was hosted in the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The first day consisted of tutorials explaining the basics of Condor usage, workflows, administration, and security. Having spent more time doing general support with OSG and working with the support workflow, I haven't spent as much time as I'd like with Condor, but the tutorials did show me some things that I would like to try. I think that next year, these tutorials would be even more useful for me after trying some new things with Condor in the coming months.
The final three days consisted of researchers, admins, and companies showing and discussing off the multitude of ways that they use Condor to enhance and extend their workflows. Of particular interest to me was the way that DreamWorks used Condor to send jobs to their rendering software to create their animated films. They showed the trailer for Madagascar 3, which is their first movie to be created using Condor from beginning to end in the rendering process.
It was interesting to hear other outfits explain how they have had to work around some things Condor currently can't do and see how the Condor team was curious to see if these things could be implemented into coming versions of Condor. The team was very interested to expand and enhance Condor, which is already a very capable product.
Overall it was a good experience that made me aware of all the things that can be done with Condor. I look forward to trying some of these things for my own, and hopefully returning next year with a much better understanding of Condor as a whole so that I can gain even more information from the talks and tutorials.
