Bright Computing Now Resells Altair PBS Professional Workload Manager, Delivering HPC Operational Efficiencies and Cost Savings

Bright Computing, a leader in cluster management software, today announced that the company has become a global authorized reseller of Altair Engineering’s PBS Professional® software. Perhaps the most widely used workload management system in HPC, PBS Professional software has long been an optional integrated workload manager for Bright. What’s new is that the company is now a global reseller of PBS Professional, bundling Bright Cluster Manager with a free, 90-day temporary license of PBS Professional with an option to purchase.

Bright Computing provides PBS Professional as a pre-integrated, user-selectable option along with a number of other popular workload managers. Upon selection, Bright automatically configures and deploys PBS Professional throughout the cluster, and provides monitoring and management of the workload manager through the intuitive Bright Cluster Manager GUI, its powerful cluster management shell and the web-based user portal. Additional benefits of the seamless integration include sampling, analysis and visualization of a wide range of workload manager statistics within the Bright GUI, automatic head node failover, access to the Bright SOAP API, and pre-job health checking capability.

“With Bright Computing becoming an authorized reseller of PBS Professional at a global level, more companies will now have access to a solution that meets all of their needs,” said Bill Nitzberg, CTO of PBS Works. “We are looking forward to growing our relationship with Bright Computing, and helping companies to further optimize HPC projects to run efficiently and easily.”

The combination of Bright Cluster Manager tightly coupled with PBS Professional delivers a number of operational efficiencies that reduce costs, improve system utilization/throughput, and save energy. Further, the combination of Bright Cluster Manager with PBS Professional solves the productivity-killing problem known as “Black Hole Node Syndrome.” Unlike other cluster management software, Bright works closely with workload managers to identify nodes that, although appear to be functioning normally, have subtle problems that will crash compute jobs. Bright sidelines these nodes and alerts the system administrators.

A leading aerospace manufacturing company is a noteworthy joint customer of the two companies. This manufacturing giant was able to put an end to its black hole node syndrome, gain measurable operating efficiencies and streamline system management efforts across a number of distributed HPC clusters.

“We took the decision to resell PBS Professional in response to customer requests,” said Dr. Matthijs van Leeuwen, founder and CEO of Bright Computing. “We are now able to streamline both their purchasing and support processes, in addition to providing them with a complete, end-to-end solution for deployment, provisioning, scheduling, monitoring and management.”