Altair Engineering, Inc., a global leader in innovative product development, advanced engineering software and grid computing technology, today announced the release of PBS Professional 7.0SP1, the next generation of the company's PBS Professional technology. PBS Professional technology optimizes the utilization of enterprise computing resources by aggregating hardware and software assets, and intelligently scheduling computational workloads based on business policies. "We continue to enhance PBS Professional in response to our customers' requests and technology advancements," said Michael Humphrey, Altair's vice president of Enterprise Computing. "In this latest release we have concentrated on ease of use and flexibility enhancements in our scheduling module. These new features help reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies for customers who operate heterogeneous data center environments." PBS Professional 7.0SP1 provides a number of major enhancements, including * Ease of use and scheduling enhancements for heterogeneous environments * Tight integration with Hewlett-Packard (HP) MPI libraries * Tight Integration with LAM-MPI 6.5.9 * PBS Professional port to Open Solaris on AMD Opteron processor- based platforms Customers who operate heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructures comprised of SMP systems, clusters and hybrid systems can increase resource efficiencies and reduce job turnaround times with PBS Professional 7.0SP1. Engineers and scientists have more flexibility to easily specify where their jobs run (if they know their application runs best on a particular architecture type) or they can let PBS schedule the job onto the first available platform that meets their resource requirements. Not only does this feature increase ease of use, but it also increases the utilization of resources and reduces job turnaround times. Altair continues to tightly integrate PBS Professional with industry standard MPI libraries. In earlier releases, PBS Professional tightly integrated with LAM 7.0, MPICH and IBM POE. This time, PBS Professional tightly integrates with LAM-MPI 6.5.9 and HP's MPI libraries. The result is improved system resiliency under a variety of system failure modes, as well as enhanced accounting accuracy. Additionally, systems administrators are relieved of the need to create and maintain epilogue scripts to clean up after aborted MPI jobs. "Altair is an important partner in HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio, which effectively combines scalable compute management, data management and visualization," said Bruce Toal, director of marketing for HP's High- Performance Computing division. "The integration of PBS Professional with HP's MPI technologies powered by HP ProLiant and Integrity servers and cluster platforms running Linux or HP-UX enables customers to significantly improve flexibility and price performance with a validated solution suite for successful installation and operational ease." PBS Professional 7.0SP1 has been ported, tested and made generally available for the Solaris 10 operating system running on AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture. "Both enterprise and HPC data centers are coming to rely on the Solaris 10 operating system in conjunction with AMD Opteron processor-based servers," said Patrick Patla, director of server/workstation marketing at AMD. "PBS Professional is already widely deployed on AMD64 systems using Linux, and Altair's expansion of their offering to include the Solaris 10 platform helps to strengthen their product line."