Altair Engineering announces immediate availability of PBS Works 10.2

Latest release delivers an intelligent portal that makes HPC simple to use and manage.

Troy, Mich – Altair Engineering today announced the immediate availability of PBS Works 10.2. This latest version builds upon the proven scalability and availability of PBS Professional® for workload scheduling; delivers a Web-based version of PBS Catalyst ™, an intelligent job management portal; and delivers additional charting and scalability enhancements to PBS Analytics™, for visualizing complex HPC workloads and optimizing application software licenses to support data-driven decision making.

“In 2010, high-performance computing is poised for a breakout year,” said Dr. Bill Nitzberg, chief technical officer for PBS Works. “The driving focus behind PBS Works has always been on making HPC easier to manage and simpler to use. The PBS Works 10.2 suite adds support for dynamic node provisioning that helps match resources to incoming jobs. We’ve also improved the overall scalability and resiliency to keep pace with the rapidly growing complexity of today’s application workloads.”

A worldwide study by IDC Research indicated that the marketplace has welcomed Altair’s focus throughout 2009 on the features and improvements that users of high-performance computing value most. In a very fragmented market where 19 different job-scheduling and queuing tools are available, the study found that, for the largest systems, PBS Works had been adopted by nearly 20%, more than any competing solution. Among the most recently installed systems at user sites, PBS Works again was the most popular choice, adopted by nearly 20% of the sites surveyed.

What’s New in PBS Works
Highlights and Key Features:

* New Web version of PBS Catalyst, with an easy-to-use and simple-to-manage interface
* Intelligent, application-aware user “portals” that raise user productivity and simplify overall management
* Dynamic node provisioning that helps match compute resources with incoming jobs
* Additional query and charting options with PBS Analytics

“Today’s HPC users demand powerful tools that can match their constantly changing workloads with available computing resources,” said Barry Bolding, Cray’s vice president of scalable systems. “PBS Works makes using and managing HPC simple, fast and cost effective, helping our joint customers get the most from their HPC investments.”

PBS Professional®
PBS Professional, the foundation of all PBS Works solutions, makes it possible to easily create intelligent policies to manage distributed, mixed-vendor computing resources, including applications, as a single, unified system.

Easily scaling to support tens of thousands of processors—from clusters to the largest systems, and backed by the brightest technology partners—PBS Works manages HPC workloads in ways that are efficient, robust and field-proven – even in the most complex computing environments.

Highlights and Key Features:

* Dynamically provisions nodes to match workloads
* Additional job submission ‘hooks’ for optimized resource utilization
* General-purpose job check pointing and restart
* Support for Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise version 11

PBS Analytics™
PBS Analytics is an easy-to-use data analysis and visualization solution that provides HPC and application administrators with powerful analytical tools that support data-driven planning and decision-making.

With a solution designed to be easily customized, job data from multiple PBS Professional servers can be aggregated into a single database for accurate analyses and reporting. PBS Analytics makes it possible to model usage trends and pinpoint opportunities for resource consolidation or sharing.

Key improvements:

* More scalable and resilient to easily support larger and complex data sets
* Create and drill into multi-dimensional charts
* Expanded platform support for data collectors on Windows and Linux systems

PBS Catalyst™
No two HPC configurations are the same – every HPC user has different system, user and application requirements. To best meet these demanding and varied requirements, PBS Catalyst comes in two forms: a Web-based version that allows users to easily submit work to remote PBS Professional compute nodes, as well as a powerful desktop client version that enables users to submit jobs to local and remote systems.

Using either the Web or desktop versions, PBS Catalyst makes it easy for users to submit and manage jobs running on PBS Professional compute nodes. Since there are no complicated commands to learn or scripts to write and maintain PBS Catalyst raises the productivity of users, allowing them to spend more time creating better models and simulations.

When combined with PBS Analytics, the Web-based implementation of PBS Catalyst becomes a powerful “portal” to high-performance computing resources. Application administrators easily can create job submission interfaces that match the needs and skills of users – hiding them from complicated commands. Just as important, “portals” also include the job-data analysis and reporting tools needed to ensure that you’re getting the most from your HPC and application investments.

PBS Works 10.2 is available now from Altair and Altair channel partners.