A few years ago, a global team of scientists parlayed decades of research into the discovery of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle considered a building block of the universe. A humble software program called HTCondor churned away in the background, helping analyze data gathered from billions of particle collisions.
Cut to 2016, and HTCondor is on to a new collision: helping scientists detect gravitational waves caused 1.3 billion years ago by a collision between two black holes 30 times as massive as our sun.
From revealing the Higgs boson, among the smallest particles known to science, to detecting the impossibly massive astrophysics of black holes, the HTCondor High Throughput Computing (HTC) software has proven indispensable to processing the vast and complex data produced by big international science. Computer scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison pioneered these distributed high throughput computing technologies over the last three decades.
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