SCIENCE

Altair Engineering reported that licenses of PBS Professional scheduling-optimization software are being shipped by SGI with SGI Altix UV, the world's fastest, most scalable supercomputer. PBS Professional makes it easy for SGI Altix UV users to create intelligent policies to manage their most complex workloads, optimizing use of the system's massive technical computing power.

PBS Professional is a preferred workload management solution for the SGI Altix UV family, which began shipping in June 2010. Based on a policy-driven architecture, PBS Professional continually optimizes the usage of high-performance computing (HPC) resources, ensuring improved productivity, and reducing hardware and software licensing costs.

SGI's Altix UV offers unprecedented performance, scalability and open architecture, and is available in three models (Altix UV 10, 100 and 1000). It scales to as many as 2,048 cores (256 sockets) with architectural support to 262,144 cores, and offers up to 16 terabytes of global shared memory in a single system image. The Altix UV family is used by critical technical computing sectors, including government and defense agencies, universities and research organizations, and others who require advanced compute capabilities and data analysis and processing.

"PBS Professional was the natural choice for inclusion with our Altix UV shipments," said Bill Mannel, vice president of product marketing for SGI. "It allows our customers to manage their most complex workloads while employing their resources with the greatest efficiency, and scales to support tens-of-thousands of processors. PBS Professional is a crucial system element for our customers."

SGI Altix UV users can easily create intelligent policies with PBS Professional, enabling them to manage distributed, mixed-vendor computer applications as a single, unified system. With PBS Professional, Altix UV users gain the benefits of a next-generation backfill scheduling system that accurately predicts job start times, offering more control and predictability over schedules and timelines by taking into account all aspects of the site scheduling policies. This improved backfill scheduling system ensures that multiple top-priority jobs begin as soon as possible, regardless of backfilling by smaller jobs, honoring enterprise policies while maximizing throughput.

Additionally, Altix UV supports the deployment of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPUs) to supercharge performance for many workloads. Users can then employ PBS Professional for both basic and advanced scheduling of jobs onto the units. Basic scheduling allows for prioritization of jobs based on site policies, controlling access to nodes with GPGPUs, ensuring the units are not over-subscribed and tracking their use in accounting logs. Configuring PBS Professional to perform basic scheduling of GPGPUs simply requires defining and configuring a single custom resource to represent the number of units on each node.

"Altair has maintained a strong relationship with SGI for nearly 20 years. SGI customers should take comfort in knowing Altix product lines are supported by PBS Professional as the preferred solution for managing complex jobs scheduling," said Bill Nitzberg, Ph.D, chief technical officer for PBS Works. "Our development roadmap is closely aligned with SGI's plans to continually provide support for newer SGI systems with dedicated HPC professionals who have vast experience in the domain."