Condor Week 2006: Leaders in business, academia home in on local technology

Hailing from the worlds of finance, business, information technology and academia, an international group of experts will converge here Monday-Thursday, April 24-27, to share their experiences with Condor, an unprecedented and free-of-charge computing technology developed by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Condor — named after the scavenging bird of prey — works by networking computers together into “flocks” and harnessing all their available power into one multitasking “supercomputer.” The technology has proven invaluable in fields that routinely handle massive amounts of data, from genome mapping and space science to international banking and computer animation.

UW–Madison scientists have been refining Condor for two decades, but in recent years the open-source technology has rapidly spilled onto the global stage. As testament to that fact, Condor Week attendants will travel to Madison from at least 10 different countries, and the event will feature several high-profile talks by representatives from financial powerhouse JP Morgan, for example, and the popular search engine Yahoo!

“Condor Week is an opportunity for the global community to come together and exchange ideas and experiences with Condor,” says Miron Livny, a UW–Madison computer scientist, who pioneered the technology more than 20 years ago. ” Ultimately, our goal is the democratization of computing — what I always say is that you don’t have to be a super-person to do supercomputing.”

Speakers will be available for interviews during breaks in the meeting and after presentations.