ECONOMICS

Altair Engineering, a global leader in product design consulting, engineering software and high-performance computing technology, today announced the release of PBS Pro(TM) version 5.4, the next generation of its Portable Batch System (PBS) technology that helps customers optimize the utilization of enterprise computing environments by intelligently aggregating and scheduling computational resources. "PBS Pro version 5.4 provides the reliability, availability and resiliency features required by customers who are deploying massive compute infrastructures comprised of thousands of compute nodes," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Enterprise Computing, Altair. "The HPC community has rapidly shifted to clustered and distributed compute environments built from commodity technologies. This shift has dramatically increased the number of compute nodes deployed within an enterprise. Altair is providing PBS Pro v5.4 to effectively manage these massive computational installations." PBS Pro v5.4 continues to raise the standard of workload management solutions for the high performance computing industry by delivering significant advancements in technology focused on increasing performance in the areas of Reliability, Availability and Resiliency for very large enterprise deployments. Enhanced PBS Pro 5.4 Features Include: PBS Pro Server software failover -- The PBS Pro v5.4 server can be deployed in an active/passive manner. The passive (back-up) PBS Pro server monitors the health of the active PBS Pro server and can automatically assume its role in the event of a failure of the active server or associated hardware host. Such switching from passive to active occurs without interruption to users or jobs that are currently running or queued. Automatic job recovery -- PBS Pro v5.4 allows the ability for any computational job which has been interrupted due to a failure in the infrastructure (hardware, software, or network failure) to automatically be requeued and re-scheduled without manual intervention. Network topography scheduling -- PBS Pro v5.4 facilitates the ability to group computation nodes to match the network topology. This information can then be utilized to make scheduling decisions, such as ensuring that large MPI jobs are scheduled to run on nodes within the same network switch. PBS Pro v5.4 is scheduled for release in December 2003 and will be globally distributed and supported by demonstrations throughout the US, Europe and Asia in Q1 2004. To learn more about PBS Pro, visit Altair at Supercomputing 2003 in Phoenix Arizona, November 17 thru the 21st, 2003 (booth # 919).