High-throughput computing (HTC) is a computer science term to describe the use of many computing resources over long periods of time to accomplish a computational task.
The HTC community is also concerned with robustness and reliability of jobs over a long-time scale. That is, being able to create a reliable system from unreliable components. This research is similar to transaction processing, but at a much larger and distributed scale.
Some HTC systems, such as HTCondor and PBS, can run tasks on opportunistic resources. It is a difficult problem, however, to operate in this environment.
On one hand the system needs to provide a reliable operating environment for the user’s jobs, but at the same time the system must not compromise the integrity of the execute node and allow the owner to always have full control of their resources.