SCIENCE

Altair Engineering announced that PBS Professional, Altair's EAL3+ security certified commercial-grade high-performance computing (HPC) workload management solution, is celebrating its 20th anniversary on June 17. During the month of June, the company also will exhibit at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Hamburg, Germany June 19-23, and launch its PBS Professional version 11.1 update.

Since its inception in 1991, PBS Professional has become the foundation of all PBS Works solutions. PBS Works is a popular solution set for optimizing workload scheduling and management of complex jobs in the HPC environment to ensure that technologies are being used to their greatest efficiency. It enables organizations to maximize efficient use of their computing resources and to initiate HPC jobs rapidly, thereby improving their overall productivity and return on investment.

With the launch of version 11.1, PBS Professional offers improved stability, improved security, and expanded platform support. It will also feature official support for new platforms including CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) v6, and SGI Performance Suite v1. PBS Works will highlight these new features along with its full suite of on-demand cloud computing technologies during the ISC at booth #820 at the Congress Center Hamburg June 19-23.

"In our 20 year history, PBS Professional has proven to be an industry leader, breaking through many barriers in high performance computing, and we are looking forward to continue contributing to developments that will further optimize HPC projects to run efficiently and easily," said PBS Works CTO Bill Nitzberg.  "Exhibiting at ISC will be an ideal platform for PBS to share expertise and insights stemming from our rich company history while also discussing the latest industry trends and updates with ISC attendees during this dynamic time for high-performance computing."

Altair personnel established PBS Professional in conjunction with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as NASA launched a project to produce a replacement for the Network Queuing System (NQS), its original system used to manage batch queuing on the supercomputers of the time. The new system had to be extensible and maintainable; capable of managing parallel systems, cluster systems and traditional supercomputers; able to support any scheduling policy; and standards compliant. To meet these needs, Altair staff worked to both standardize batch scheduling, creating the POSIX 1002.3d batch standard, and develop the Portable Batch System (now PBS Professional). PBS Professional was later used by NASA as the core enabling software in the NASA Metacenter, a prototype Computational Grid, providing automatic load sharing among supercomputers at NASA Ames and NASA Langley.

With PBS Professional, Altair personnel have led several key developments in propelling the HPC industry forward including:

• Served as founding members of the Grid Forum (now the Open Grid Forum), as well as on its board of directors
• Created NASA's Information Power Grid (IPG), one of the first "production grids"
• Launched the first demonstration of advanced reservations in a commercial product
• Established the use of PBS Professional on all seven continents