ENGINEERING

Altair Engineering, Inc., a global leader recognized for innovative product development, advanced engineering software and grid computing technology, announced that Altair's PBS Pro Workload Management System will be deployed by NASA for its "Columbia" system. As part of Columbia, NASA will integrate a cluster of 20 interconnected SGI Altix 512-processor systems, for a total of 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 processors, to significantly increase the agency's capability and capacity through creation of "the Space Exploration Simulator." The new machine will be based at NASA Ames Research Center in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. It will provide an estimated 10-fold increase in NASA's current supercomputing capacity. PBS Pro is a workload management solution for grid computing environments, LINUX clusters and distributed servers and workstations. PBS Pro optimizes the utilization of computing resources by intelligently scheduling and managing computational workload. "The Columbia system is a tremendous development for NASA and the nation. Simulation of the evolution of the Earth and planetary ecosystems with high fidelity has been beyond the reach of Earth scientists for decades," said Ghassem Asrar, Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "With Columbia, scientists are already seeing dramatic improvements in the fidelity of simulations in such areas as hurricane track prediction, global ocean circulation, prediction of large scale structures in the universe, and the physics of supernova detonations." "As we deploy and operate a supercomputer of this magnitude, it was imperative that we have a scaleable workload management system to efficiently manage job throughput ensuring the best utilization of this machine," said Alan Powers of Advanced Management Technologies. "NASA has worked with PBS Pro over the years and will continue to do so with Project Columbia." "We are pleased that NASA has chosen to deploy PBS Pro with Columbia," said Bob Bishop, Chairman and CEO, SGI. "Full productivity of this high performance computing system will require effective and scalable workload management." "Altair is excited to continue our long standing relationship with NASA by providing PBS Pro for the Project Columbia," said Dr. Bill Nitzberg, Altair's Chief Technology Officer for Grid Technologies. "NASA's project Columbia will greatly accelerate their scientific and space exploration capabilities which will be beneficial for many years to come."