ENGINEERING

Highly Scalable Workload Management Solution Will Manage Computational Workloads for Massively Parallel Blue Gene Supercomputers: Altair Engineering, Inc., a leading global provider of technology and services that strengthen client innovation and decision-making, announced that PBS Professional 8.0 is now generally available for the IBM System Blue Gene Solution. PBS Professional 8.0 adds support for massive IBM Blue Gene systems through new virtual node functionality. Blue Gene customers can now have one common workload management solution across their entire high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. "Blue Gene systems offer a unique combination of ultra-scale performance, and efficient use of power and floor space," said Herb Schultz, director of Deep Computing Marketing, IBM. "Altair's highly scalable and resilient PBS Professional will ensure that customers are maximizing the value of these critical resources at all times." PBS Professional is an advanced workload management solution for HPC environments. The software maximizes the utilization of computing resources by intelligently scheduling and managing computational workloads. 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 variety of industries. "PBS Professional leads the industry in scalability, availability and resiliency, and we anticipate it will be a very popular workload management solution for Blue Gene customers," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Altair's PBS GridWorks business unit. "Releasing PBS Professional for IBM Blue Gene is a natural extension of our longstanding relationship with IBM. Blue Gene has established a new level of scalability, and PBS Professional allows customers to more efficiently and easily harness this power." Blue Gene is a unique computer architecture that is the result of a five- year project dedicated to building a new family of supercomputers. Optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data, the computers consume a fraction of the power and floor space required by competing systems. The extremely efficient, ultra-scalable Blue Gene is currently listed as Number One on the TOP500 list of supercomputers, a compilation that is updated twice a year and available on its Web site. Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) is one of a select group of organizations that has successfully implemented the beta version of PBS Professional 8.0. Located in Switzerland, EPFL is one of the major European centers of teaching and research in information technology.