ENGINEERING

Altair today introduced PBS Professional 12.0, the latest version of its globally popular workload management and job scheduling solution for supercomputing, with exceptional new features that dramatically speed scheduling and boost utilization and agility.

“PBS Professional 12.0 advances Altair’s technology significantly farther along the road to exascale systems, in which clusters will grow from today’s tens of thousands of processors to a million or more,” said Bill Nitzberg, chief technology officer for PBS Works at Altair. “Our latest release is faster, is more robust and offers better utilization.  The HPC landscape is changing faster than ever around Clouds, Green, GPUs, and co-processors making customization key.  Our new plug-ins provide the agility needed to keep up with this ever changing landscape.”

PBS Professional 12.0 offers new capabilities that increase the efficiency and flexibility of supercomputing, including:

Faster scheduling and start-up

·         New scheduler optimizations provide 40 percent faster scheduling for complex workloads.

·         Additionally, power-on is more than 10 times faster than previously achievable, with huge clusters able to start up in less than a minute. This means that systems can recover from computer-room power failures more rapidly than ever before.

·         PBS Professional 12.0 also enables new racks of systems to be configured 10 times faster— in seconds, rather than minutes, even for extremely large systems.

·         The rapid-start capabilities of PBS Professional 12.0 also apply to interactive/debug jobs. Users become more productive by virtually eliminating waiting time before starting interactive jobs, where policies permit and resources are available.

Higher utilization through a new “shrink-to-fit” feature

·         Shrink-to-fit allows users to run jobs—or portions of jobs—in the period immediately before a planned maintenance outage.  Typically, computer systems remain unused for several hours prior to an outage because insufficient time is available to complete a job that may take many more hours to run. PBS Professional 12.0 fills those holes with malleable “shrink-to-fit” jobs, allowing useful work to be accomplished during the pre-outage period when otherwise no jobs would be running on the system and thereby providing greater than 95 percent utilization. Jobs get done sooner and scheduling of the computing systems operates more efficiently.

·         One Altair beta customer reported they were able to reclaim 800,000 CPU hours over two months by using shrink-to-fit to run jobs prior to outages.

Plug-ins for “execution events”

·         PBS Professional 12.0 introduces the second major component of Altair’s plug-in infrastructure, allowing users to control, modify, extend and change job lifecycle events in the execution stage. Earlier, Altair released plug-ins for job submission filtering, provisioning, and scheduling. The latest plug-in allows for health checks prior to starting the job, filtering and changing computer behavior when the job starts and ensuring cleanup is correct.

PBS Professional 12.0 is built with increased hardening for Windows platforms, and the new release is Windows 8 compatible. Its broad platform support ensures that PBS Professional runs everywhere, including on the latest platforms such as Windows Server 2012, SGI UV2, SGI ICE-X and Cray CLE 4.1.

PBS Professional 12.0 is available for download at http://www.pbsworks.com.