DiaGrid is a large, multicampus distributed research computing network utilizing the HTCondor system and centered at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
[citation needed] DiaGrid is managed by Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP), the central information technology organization at Purdue's West Lafayette campus, and ITaP's research computing unit the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, which also operates the Steele, Coates, Rossmann, Hansen and Carter cluster supercomputers.
While this "opportunistic" model limits the ability to do parallel processing and communications, a HTCondor pool can provide smaller, serial jobs vast numbers of cycles in a very short amount of time.
HTCondor—and by extension, DiaGrid—is designed for high-throughput computing and is excellent for parameter sweeps, Monte Carlo simulation, or nearly any serial application.
[citation needed] DiaGrid and BoilerGrid have been used by researchers at Purdue and elsewhere for a variety of purposes,[1] such as imaging the structure of viruses at near-atomic resolutions,[4][5] simulating the early stages of the Solar System's formation, projecting the reliability of Indiana's electrical supply, modeling the spread of water pollutants, discerning the structure of protein molecules and identifying millions of potential new forms of zeolites, silicate minerals widely used to catalyze chemical reactions on an industrial scale.