Altair Engineering, Inc., a global leader in innovative product development, advanced engineering software and grid computing technology, announced today a cooperative business arrangement with Accelrys, a leading provider of computational software and services for scientific researchers. Under the arrangement, Accelrys and Altair have developed an interface that allows Accelrys' Material Studio software to operate with Altair's PBS Professional software. Accelrys will include a free trial license of PBS Professional with its Materials Studio software on a limited-time basis, and the companies have developed a special promotional pricing program. Materials Studio is a suite of integrated materials simulation software for use in research and development in the materials, chemical, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Both software programs run on Windows, Linux and UNIX platforms. The promotional pricing offer, which represents a significant discount off standard U.S. list pricing, will be in effect for a limited time beginning in December 2005, and may be extended if response is favorable. "Accelrys is the key ISV [independent software vendor] in the materials sciences sector, and we are pleased to enter into this business arrangement with them," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Altair Engineering's Enterprise Computing business unit. "I am confident that Accelrys customers will see that this integrated combination provides a compelling value proposition." PBS Professional is an open workload management solution for grid computing environments, Linux clusters, and distributed servers and workstations. The software optimizes the utilization of computing resources by intelligently scheduling and managing computational workload in a number of industries, including manufacturing, energy, financial, government research, weather forecasting, life and materials sciences, and digital media. By increasing the efficiency of the hardware and software resources, PBS Professional reduces total cost of ownership and provides true business value to grid computing customers. "Integrating Altair's PBS Professional with Materials Studio allows us to provide a more complete solution to our customers," said Steve Levine, senior director of corporate development at Accelrys. "Workload management is an important component of our customers' HPC [high-performance computing] infrastructure. Providing an integrated, best-of-breed solution will better enable them reduce deployment times as well as administrative costs."