ENGINEERING

Altair Engineering and Cray announce today the release of Altair's PBS Professional workload management solution on the Cray XD1. PBS Professional has been fully integrated with Cray's Active Manager software, which automates system monitoring, control and configuration to simplify administration and increase system availability. The addition of PBS Professional software to the Cray XD1 platform demonstrates both parties' commitment to meeting the needs of the high-performance computing (HPC) user community. PBS Professional workload management technology is now available for purchase on Cray's full product line, which includes the Cray X1E, Cray XT3 and Cray XD1 supercomputers. "The Alabama Supercomputer Center has been running PBS Professional on our Cray XD1 system for several months now," said Wayne Whitmore, Alabama Supercomputer Center chief operating officer. "Our Cray XD1 system has 144 2.2 GHz AMD Opteron CPU processors, with a capacity of 634 gigaFLOPS -- a real workhorse in our facility. PBS Professional has allowed us to efficiently and reliably manage the workload on this large compute resource. Additionally, it has provided us with one common workload manager across our entire heterogeneous supercomputing center." "Cray's HPC customers demand a robust workload management solution that can extend across their heterogeneous computing environments," said Amar Shan, Cray XD1 product manager. "We are very excited to offer them a powerful solution that integrates PBS Professional with the Cray XD1 Active Manager system administration and management features. When customers use PBS Professional with the Cray XD1 system, they'll be able to link workload management with Active Manager's automated configuration and monitoring features. This solution simplifies system administration and allows users to focus on their applications." The Cray XD1 supercomputer combines breakthrough interconnect, management and reconfigurable computing technologies to meet user demand for exceptional performance, reliability and usability. Designed to meet the requirements of highly demanding HPC applications in fields ranging from product design to weather prediction to scientific research, the Cray XD1 system is an indispensable tool for engineers and scientists. This innovative tool helps them simulate and analyze faster, as well as solve more complex problems and bring solutions to market sooner. "Altair is pleased to extend our strong relationship with Cray to include the Cray XD1 system," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Enterprise Computing at Altair. "Customers can integrate Cray XD1 systems into their HPC environments and maintain a consistent PBS Professional interface across their entire infrastructure. In doing so, they can shorten deployment time and increase user productivity." PBS Professional enables customers in government, life sciences, energy, research, logistics, manufacturing and finance to optimize the utilization of their HPC environments. It does so by aggregating computation resources into a virtual pool and intelligently scheduling their computational workload. Engineers and scientists who utilize PBS Professional are more productive, because they can focus their attention on their analyses, rather than on the need to remember various application- and operating systems-specific job control languages.