MTC denotes high-performance computations comprising multiple distinct activities, coupled via file system operations.
MTC includes loosely coupled applications that are generally communication-intensive but not naturally expressed using standard message passing interface commonly found in HPC, drawing attention to the many computations that are heterogeneous but not "happily" parallel".
[6] Raicu et al. further state: "There is more to HPC than tightly coupled MPI, and more to HTC than embarrassingly parallel long running jobs.
Efficient support for these sorts of applications on existing large scale systems will involve substantial technical challenges and will have big impact on science.
Some projects that could support MTC workloads are Condor,[9] Mapreduce,[10] Hadoop,[11] Boinc,[12] Cobalt[permanent dead link] HTC-mode,[13] Falkon,[14] and Swift.