ENGINEERING

Grid technology will manage HPC workload of advanced data analysis and mining software for the life sciences industry: Altair Engineering, Inc., a leading global provider of technology and services that strengthen client innovation and decision-making, today announced that it has joined SciTegic's independent software vendor (ISV) partner program to provide software compatibility between SciTegic's Pipeline Pilot and Altair's PBS Professional grid software. Joint customers will benefit from an enhanced ability to solve complex research problems more quickly and efficiently by distributing their computational workload across a grid managed by PBS Professional. Altair Engineering is the first grid technology provider to become an ISV partner of SciTegic, a wholly owned subsidiary of Accelrys, Inc., a pioneer in data pipelining and workflow tools. The aim of the collaboration is to provide software components for Pipeline Pilot users that will allow them to invoke external applications in parallel, taking full advantage of distributed computing systems. In addition, PBS Professional will more easily support scheduled access to HPC applications and distribution of protocols over Pipeline Pilot compute clusters, allowing one organization to scale Pipeline Pilot usage to hundreds of users. "As deployments of Pipeline Pilot within research organizations have grown significantly, the efficient distribution and management of computationally intensive jobs submitted by individual users has turned out to be critical," said Mathew Hahn, vice president of Platform Strategy and Technologies at Accelrys. "We are delighted to be working with Altair, as the PBS Professional package can efficiently manage the computational workloads of our user base." PBS Professional is an open workload management solution for HPC environments. The software maximizes the utilization of computing resources by intelligently scheduling and managing computational workload. 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 in a number of industries. "Pipeline Pilot has become an indispensable informatics tool for the life sciences industry, and PBS Professional was designed to enhance the performance of just such a dynamic platform," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Altair's PBS GridWorks business unit. "Having the speed and flexibility to manage and process massive amounts of drug development and research data is essential for pharmaceutical companies to gain an advantage in a highly competitive environment. Integrating PBS Professional with Pipeline Pilot can provide that edge."