ALTAIR PBS Pro

Altair develops portable batch system (PBS) technology, including PBS Pro™ workload management software. PBS Pro technology helps Altair's customers optimise the utilisation of computing environments by intelligently aggregating and scheduling computational resources. Key benefits of PBS Pro include:

• Increased utilisation of current computing and network resources

• Reduced burden on system administrators

• Enhanced understanding of computational requirements for capacity planning

• Expandable distribution of production workloads across wide-area networks

• Logical organisation of physically separate computing systems

Notably, Altair has been working with Ford Motor Company's Numerically Intensive Computing (NIC) Department to leverage PBS Pro workload management software in order to increase job scheduling efficiency and improve service levels to NIC customers.

In today's environment, users need cost-effective services and tools that allow easy sharing of costly computing resources without knowing the specifics of each system environment. PBS Pro is one such solution that can contribute significantly to your organisation.

There are some basic questions to consider in choosing workload management software:

• Do you have workstations you'd like to cluster together?

• Do you have large computers you'd like to share between departments?

• Do you have costly computer servers you'd like to use more effectively?

• Do you have one or more supercomputers?

If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, then you owe it to your organisation to take a closer look at PBS Pro.

The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and the International Genomics Consortium are using PBS Pro with their newly deployed supercomputing infrastructure.

PBS Pro will be instrumental in managing and optimising the new supercomputing infrastructure, consisting of a 1024 processor Beowulf IBM Linux cluster, the largest cluster of its type focusing on genomic research. The implementation of Altair’s workload management software will advance research on a number of complex diseases as well as advance the utilisation of this one-of-a-kind cluster by fully optimising its hardware and software resources, allowing the group to further its efforts at developing improved therapeutics in a shorter period of time.

"We appreciate the support that Altair has given to our scientific computing efforts. This will allow us to better manage our computational resources," said Dr. William Lewis.

Ed Suh, TGen’s chief information officer, agrees. "The amount of computing power necessary to conduct our research is enormous, so we needed a solution that allowed us to fully utilise our processing power," said Suh. "The strength of the solution and Altair’s recognised leadership made the selection of PBS Pro an easy choice."