Center for High Throughput Computing
The Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC), established in 2006, aims to bring the power of High Throughput Computing to all fields of research, and to allow the future of HTC to be shaped by insight from all fields.
Are you a UW-Madison researcher or educator looking to increase the impact of computing on your teaching or research? Contact us to explore ways to leverage the open computing services offered by the CHTC.
Contact UsHigh Throughput Computing is a collection of principles and techniques which maximize the effective throughput of computing resources towards a given problem. When applied for scientific computing, HTC can result in improved use of a computing resource, improved automation, and help drive the scientific problem forward.
The team at CHTC develops technologies and services for HTC. CHTC is the home of the HTCondor Software Suite which has over 30 years of experience in tackling HTC problems; it manages shared computing resources for researchers on the UW-Madison campus; and it leads the OSG Consortium, a national-scale environment for distributed HTC.
Spotlight User
Behind Nobel-winning IceCube discoveries, decades of high-throughput computing
UW–Madison physicist Francis Halzen has been named a 2026 Nobel laureate in physics for his work as principal investigator of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Over the course of that work, IceCube researchers have developed a longstanding collaboration with the Center for High Throughput Computing.
Last Year Serving UW-Madison
750 Facilitator Interactions
564 Projects Supported
17,745 HTC Core Years
8,264 HPC Core Years
| College | Projects Supported | HTC Core Years | HPC Core Years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agricultural and Life Sciences | 98 | 5,179 | 191 |
| Business | 3 | 32 | – |
| Education | 5 | 180 | – |
| Engineering | 109 | 3,004 | 5,528 |
| Institute for Environmental Studies | 4 | 1 | – |
| Law | 1 | – | – |
| Letters and Sciences | 204 | 5,894 | 1,220 |
| Medicine and Public Health | 91 | 3,051 | 108 |
| Off-Campus Collaborations | 37 | 373 | 1,212 |
| Pharmacy | 4 | 10 | 5 |
| Veterinary Medicine | 8 | 21 | – |
| Total | 564 | 17,745 | 8,264 |
Technologies and Methodologies
HTCSS
The HTCondor Software Suite (HTCSS) provides sites and users with the ability to manage and execute HTC workloads. Whether it’s managing a single laptop or 250,000 cores at CERN, HTCondor helps solve computational problems through the application of the HTC principles.
Pelican
A data transfer service, Pelican facilitates the ability for researchers to access and transfer data from where it is stored to where it needs to run. Inspired by the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) proposition to make all government funded research data publicly accessible, Pelican works to efficiently transfer this open data to researchers who require it. Pelican provides an open-source software platform for federating dataset repositories together and delivering the objects to computing capacity such as the OSPool.
CHTC’s Research Facilitation team empowers researchers to utilize computing to achieve their goals. The Research Facilitation approach emphasizes teaching users skills and methodologies to manage & automate workloads on resources like those at CHTC, the campus, or across the world.
Local and National Services
CHTC manages over 20,000 cores and dozens of GPUs for the UW-Madison campus; this resource, which is free and shared, aims to advance the mission of the University of Wisconsin in support of the Wisconsin Idea. Researchers can place their workloads on an access point at CHTC and utilize the resources at CHTC, across the campus, and across the nation.
The Open Science Pool (OSPool) is a source of computing capacity accessible to any researcher affiliated with a US academic institution, with no proposal, no allocation and no cost. Operated by CHTC as part of the OSG Consortium, the OSPool provides fair-share access to compute and storage capacity contributed by university campuses and government-supported supercomputing institutions across the nation.
The Open Science Data Federation (OSDF) connects disparate dataset repositories into a single, nation-wide data distribution network. Built on Pelican and operated by CHTC, the OSDF lets users and institutions share data files and storage capacity, delivering datasets to browsers, Jupyter notebooks and HTC environments such as the OSPool.
