GOVERNMENT

Louisiana facility offers business and industry unprecedented access to unique HPC resource: Altair Engineering, Inc., a leading global provider of technology and services that strengthen client innovation and decision-making, today announced that its PBS Professional software is the workload management solution driving the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE) system, one of the world's largest shared-memory supercomputers available to private sector and commercial users. In managing the HPC capabilities of the 4.1 terabyte (TB) system from SGI, PBS Professional facilitates the ability to apply the entire system to one complex problem or multiple projects at the same time. This is an extremely compute-intense environment," said Carolina Cruz, Ph.D., LITE executive director and chief scientist, and world-pioneer in virtual reality. "Without a powerful shared-memory system such as this, the number-crunching phase that precedes product visualization and testing can take months or even years. This is a tremendous draw to businesses who understand that the ability to perform more cycles in less time is a real advantage in bringing more robust products to market faster. The combination of Altair's PBS Professional workload management technology with the SGI system brings us that much closer to our goal of providing a complete solution to those customers. LITE is one of Louisiana's most treasured assets and will be an extremely valuable resource for innovators across the country." Located on the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, LITE is the result of a partnership of the university, the Lafayette Economic Development Authority (LEDA) and the State of Louisiana to attract new technology and business development to the state. LITE offers a level of HPC resources that has traditionally been available only to groups such as government agencies, pharmaceutical giants and aerospace companies. Thanks to the partnership that made LITE possible, commercial users can perform basic research, application development, testing and validation, product development and commercial production, as well as deliver visualization technologies and HPC modeling. The system is capable of handling the most complex problems, such as seismic analysis models used for energy exploration, real-time impact simulations for the development of safe automobiles, and the analysis of geospatial satellite imagery used for weather-related disaster preparedness and national security. LITE features one of the most comprehensive and tightly integrated installations of SGI technologies ever assembled, including a 3D immersive visualization cube, a 174-seat visualization auditorium, an immersive collaboration teleconference room, a conference room featuring an SGI Reality Center, a network of SGI Altix 350 systems powered by 352 Intel Itanium 2 processors running a standard 64-bit Linux operating environment, and an 8TB SGI InfiniteStorage Storage Area Network (SAN). The resources are all connected by a high-speed, fiber optic network. 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 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. "The SGI system at LITE is unique because of the amount of memory it makes available to solve sophisticated problems," said Michael Brown, market segment manager for Sciences, SGI. "SGI integrated PBS Professional grid technology into the system because of its ability to efficiently manage mixed workloads, as well as large, single-job deployments. This is a powerful system. PBS makes it more powerful." "Altair is proud to be part of this leading-edge deployment and to help bring additional business development to Louisiana," said Michael Humphrey, vice president of Altair's PBS GridWorks business unit. "PBS Professional has been maximizing the utilization of supercomputers since it was developed to manage aerospace computing resources for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The LITE installation is another example of how Altair and PBS Professional continue to deliver true value to our customers across a broad industry spectrum.