French National Computer Center for Higher Education Upgrades to PBS Professional 11.0

Latest version of PBS manages thousands of jobs by 1,000 users per day for France’s JADE supercomputer.

Altair Engineering, Inc announced today that CINES¹, France’s National Computer Center for Higher Education, has upgraded to PBS Professional 11.0 to manage its national² HPC system, known as JADE. PBS Professional 11.0 offers petaFLOPS scalability and more than 30 times faster cold start-up and seven times faster job submission than previous versions.

The JADE national supercomputer comprises 2,880 nodes and 23,440 cores, handling more than a thousand jobs per day from a thousand users. JADE hosts a diverse workload of science, engineering and research simulations in climatology, molecular dynamics, computational fluid dynamics, astrophysics, quantum chemistry, material science and plasma physics. PBS Professional 11.0, part of Altair’s PBS Works suite of on-demand computing technologies, monitors and optimizes workload scheduling to enable JADE to operate with optimum efficiency.

CINES, located in Montpellier, France, has provided the nation’s public research community with computing resources and services for more than three decades and since 2004 Long term data Preservation³. The center began using PBS Professional in 2008, when version 9.0 was designated as the resource scheduler for JADE.

Since 2008, PBS Professional has managed the processing of 1 million jobs for JADE. Now employing version 11.0, CINES has joined a growing number of organizations adopting PBS Professional because of its ability to scale to support hundreds of thousands of processors.

"We are confident that PBS Professional 11.0 will increase the management performance of our large-cluster system even further," said CINES. "We continue to extend our reliance on PBS Professional because it is efficiently managing jobs that involve more than 8,000 cores-as well as small jobs requiring only one or two nodes."

JADE is a heterogeneous cluster consisting of a single system with two virtual partitions. PBS Professional manages resource allocation with node-topology awareness and dynamic resource pool management.

The scalability and reliability of PBS Professional 11.0 are complemented by many other advantages over competing systems, including:

EAL3+ security certification
Faster cold start
Topology-aware scheduling
GPU scheduling
Green provisioning
OS provisioning
Estimated job-start times
Backfill scheduling
A tunable scheduling formula
Retained job history
Support for all message passing interface (MPI) integrations

Altair offers engineers, scientists and educators who use high-performance computing systems a 30-day-free-trial license of PBS Professional, as well as training courses in managing and using PBS Professional for current and new users.

"With our free-trial licenses, users can experience the simplicity, speed and flexibility of PBS Professional versus other solutions," said PBS Works CTO Bill Nitzberg. "PBS Professional 11.0 provides a significant step up in both sophistication and ease of use for professionals who want to speed the scheduling of their high-performance computing jobs, use their systems to maximum efficiency and advance their return on investment."

PBS Professional continually optimizes the way that technical HPC resources are used, ensuring that all resources are effective and efficient. The results are improved productivity, confidence in meeting service levels, and reduced hardware and software license costs.